Measurements of bistatic radar sea clutter

Bistatic radar is a technique of considerable potential importance and interest. Despite this, current understanding of the properties of bistatic clutter, and in particular, bistatic sea clutter, is limited at best. We present some results of a recent trials campaign to gather bistatic sea clutter data, and to analyse the data in order to develop models to represent bistatic radar sea clutter. The results indicate that the shape parameter of the compound K distribution model fitted to the data tends to be higher for the bistatic clutter than for the equivalent monostatic clutter. This suggests that a bistatic geometry may allow a lower detection threshold for a given probability of false alarm, and hence give improved detection performance of weak targets against a clutter background compared to the conventional monostatic geometry.