Modern military airborne radars are highly sophisticated, multi-mode systems which are required to detect difficult targets in all aspects and over a large range/velocity detection space. There are particular difficulties associated with the airborne case such as the limited antenna aperture, high platform velocity and severe clutter levels which present difficult waveform design challenges. This tutorial will consider the design parameters of high pulse repetition frequency (PRF) and medium PRF waveforms commonly used in airborne pulse Doppler radar modes. The majority of this tutorial will be devoted to the issues concerning the selection of the number of PRFs and of the PRF values used in the medium PRF mode. PRF optimisation methods using evolutionary algorithms used by the author and his colleagues in a number of recent studies will be described. Examples will be given of airborne fire control radars, airborne early warning systems and active radar seekers used in anti-aircraft missiles.
A more specific breakdown of the tutorial is given in the points below:
* Short review of high PRF pulse Doppler including, response to clutter, eclipsing, applications and
use of FMICW
* Medium PRF basic concepts of range & velocity ambiguity, applications.
* Multiple PRF schedules
* Decodability (PRF selection to insure full decodability)
* Blindness & blind velocities (PRF selection minimize blindness)
* Ghosting, target extraction and decodability margins (PRF selection to optimize this)
* Constraints on maximum, minimum and mean PRFs
* Response to clutter
* Novel short schedules
* Target detectability
* PRF Optimization using evolutionary algorithms
* Schedule design (clutter limited vs. noise limited scenarios)
* Optimization of array antenna Tx & Rx taper functions
* Case studies: airborne fire control, airborne early warning, active radar missile seeker.
