Analysis of over-the-horizon target detection based on the small aperture array

The Over-the-Horizon Radar (OTHR) is an effective approach for long-range target detection. However, most existing OTHR systems resort to receive array with quite large aperture, which makes them difficult to deploy. Based on the small aperture receive array, this paper presents a new architecture of long-range target detection system. The shortage of small aperture receive array on echo signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and beamforming is analyzed theoretically and evaluated through some experiments. To improve the performance, we make some suggestions on the design of transmit waveform, virtual array, and signal processing on high resolution spectral estimation.