Techniques for robust tracking in airborne radars

The authors describe the techniques used in an advanced multimode radar to achieve robust tracking in a package that weighs only 189 lb, occupies only 2.0 ft³ and consumes only 2000 W of power. A combination of advanced hardware and postdetection processing on a judicious choice of selected data is used to provide robust tracking. Recent advances in technology have allowed a very high degree of digital signal processing to be performed on the received signal. Two MIL-STD-1750 computers are used for the postdetection processing, the heart of which is an adaptive, nine-state Kalman filter used to estimate target position, velocity, and acceleration. Additional postdetection processing is used to support the Kalman filter in extracting target information from the data and providing immunity to various sources of inference