A procedure to improve the detection rate in radar systems with an electronically-scanned antenna

We investigate a search-and-revisit scanning policy for a surveillance radar system equipped with an electronically scanned antenna. In the search phase, the antenna beam rotates to illuminate the monitored area, and all returns exceeding a given threshold are immediately declared as detections. Then, a subset of ambiguous (namely, close enough but not exceeding the detection threshold) returns are revisited to take the final decision. The revisit phase introduces additional degrees of freedom, which can be exploited to improve the detection rate, defined as the average number of detections per minute generated by a target. Numerical examples are provided to assess the performance of the proposed scanning policy.