A Powerful Range-Doppler Clutter Rejection Strategy for Navigational Radars

Navigational radars are used to detect and continuously track a number of aircraft. In strongly cluttered environment, this can lead to broken and interrupted tracks. This could be hazardous specially in the terminal areas and approach corridors. Hence the optimum rejection of clutter is a primary requirement in navigational radars. This paper describes a method to combat arbitrary delay-Doppler clutter. The problem is approached via the signal ambiguity function. Matched filter receiver is assumed and transmitted signal parameters are optimized to achieve the clutter rejection capability. The signal set chosen is the family of frequency coded constant amplitude pulse bursts, and a criterion function is derived in terms of the frequencies of individual subpulses which has been optimized for a variety of clutter distributions. The results obtained clearly bring out the effectiveness of the method