An on-line adaptive beamforming capability for HF backscatter radar

An adaptive-array beamforming capability has been implemented on-line in an existing over-the-horizon (OTH) backscatter radar. Inputs to the beamformer consisted of signals from eight 32- element subarrays of the 256-element, 2.5-km-long receiving array at the Wide Aperture Research Facility (WARF) located in California. Both conventional and adaptive beamforming were performed prior to the usual range/Doppler analysis used to extract radar targets from noise and clutter. The Griffiths -vector algorithm, a recursive, time-domain adaptive technique, was implemented in all-digital fashion using fixed-point arithmetic on a 16-bit minicomputer. Desired signals utilized were aircraft targets and a fixed, ground-based radar repeater simulating a moving target, while unwanted signals were other-user interference and signals from a separate ground-based radar repeater. It was found that adaptive rejection of unwanted signals was dependent on pointing-angle alignment and that rejection was often increased by removal of the clutter by moving target indicator (MTI) filtering prior to adaptation. For some conditions, Doppler broadening can he produced by the time modulation imposed by continuous adaptation, unwanted-signal rejection with the adaptive beamformer is variable, but side-by-side comparisons obtained at WARF show that adaptive beamforming can reject off-azimuth signals up to 20 dB better than conventional beamforming with a -25 dB Dolph taper.