Welcome to EuRAD 2009

It is my pleasure, as conference chairman, to welcome you to the 6th European Radar Conference (EuRAD 2009) being held in Roma as part of the European Microwave Week (EuMW). EuRAD started six years ago thanks to a wonderful idea of our Dutch colleagues and friends from IRCTR and Delft University and in particular to the determination of prof. Leonard Ligthart. Since then, EuRAD has grown into one of the largest European and worldwide recognised radar events, both in terms of quality (guaranteed by a rigorous, peer review of a substantial abstract) and of quantity: in fact, the number of proposed contributions has steadily increased during six years. This year, in spite of the present international financial crisis, we have received 189 submissions to this conference, with more than 18% increase with respect to the very successful EuRAD 2008 edition. EuRAD submissions are now about 15% of the whole EuMW, making this conference the second largest of the EuMW and with an increase of its duration of more than two full days. The accepted papers are organised into twelve oral sessions plus four Focused Sessions and one common session EuMC/EuRAD (summing up to eighty-three podium presentations), complemented by a poster session. Moreover, five invited papers of wide interest are presented in the Opening and Closing sessions. This year, I feel that the strong reduction in the number of parallel sessions will enhance the benefit for the attendees. The programme covers a wide range of radar topics including Radar Subsystems and Technology, Signal Processing, Design and Evaluation, Systems and Applications; two focused sessions are dedicated to Space Radars and their Environmental Remote Sensing applications, one to Space-Time Adaptive Processing and one to Passive Radar, while the common session with EuMC is dedicated to through-the wall radar imaging. In addition to that, the programme includes other “hot” topics such as ultra wide band radar, multilateration- , interception/analysis of radar signals, new radar waveforms and OFDM radar, sea and OTH radar, phased arrays and more, with a wide and updated overview on the most recent advances in radar technology and applications.