Publications

Abstract not provided.

A radome, or radar dome, protects a radar system from exposure to the elements. Unfortunately, radomes can affect the radiation pattern of the enclosed antenna. The co-design of a platform"™s radome and radar is ideal to mitigate any deleterious effects of the radome. However, maintaining structural integrity and other platform flight requirements, particularly when integrating a new radar onto an existing platform, often limits radome electrical design choices. Radars that rely heavily on phase measurements such as monopulse, interferometric, or coherent change detection (CCD) systems require particular attention be paid to components, such as the radome, that might introduce loss and phase variations as a function of the antenna scan angle. Material properties, radome wall construction, overall dimensions, and shape characteristics of a radome can impact insertion loss and phase delay, antenna beamwidth and sidelobe level, polarization, and ultimately the impulse response of the radar, among other things, over the desired radar operating parameters. The precision-guided munitions literature has analyzed radome effects on monopulse systems for well over half a century. However, to the best of our knowledge, radome-induced errors on CCD performance have not been described. The impact of radome material and wall construction, shape, dimensions, and antenna characteristics on CCD is examined herein for select radar and radome examples using electromagnetic simulations.

The linear ground distance per unit time and ground area covered per unit time of producing synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery, termed rate of advance (ROA) and area coverage rate (ACR), are important metrics for platform and radar performance in surveillance applications. These metrics depend on many parameters of a SAR system such as wavelength, aircraft velocity, resolution, antenna beamwidth, imaging mode, and geometry. Often the effects of these parameters on rate of advance and area coverage rate are non-linear. This report addresses the impact of different parameter spaces as they relate to rate of advance and area coverage rate performance.

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Knowing the statistical characteristics of a target's radar cross-section (RCS) is crucial to the success of radar target detection algorithms. A wide range of applications currently exist for dismount (i.e. human body) detection and monitoring using ground-moving target indication (GMTI) radar systems. Dismounts are particularly challenging to detect. Their RCS is orders of magnitude lower than traditional GMTI targets, such as vehicles. Their velocity of about 0 to 1.5 m/s is also much slower than vehicular targets. Studies regarding the statistical nature of the RCS of dismounts focus primarily on simulations or very limited empirical data at specific frequencies. This paper seeks to enhance the existing body of work on dismount RCS statistics at Ku-band, which is currently lacking, and has become an important band for such remote sensing applications. We examine the RCS probability distributions of different sized humans in various stances, across aspect and elevation angle, for horizontal (HH) and vertical (VV) transmit/receive polarizations, and at diverse resolutions, using experimental data collected at Ku-band. We further fit Swerling target models to the RCS distributions and suggest appropriate detection thresholds for dismounts in this band. © 2010 SPIE.

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The Rapid Terrain Visualization Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration (RTV-ACTD) is designed to demonstrate the technologies and infrastructure to meet the Army requirement for rapid generation of digital topographic data to support emerging crisis or contingencies. The primary sensor for this mission is an interferometric synthetic aperture radar (IFSAR) designed at Sandia National Laboratories. This paper will outline the design of the system and its performance, and show some recent flight test results. The RTV IFSAR will meet DTED level III and IV specifications by using a multiple-baseline design and high-accuracy differential and carrier-phase GPS navigation. It includes innovative near-real-time DEM production on-board the aircraft. The system is being flown on a deHavilland DHC-7 Army aircraft.