Potential discrepancies in radar signature predictions for ground vehicles

An investigation of modeling issues at K/sub a/-band and above was conducted using Xpatch, a high-frequency radar signature prediction code based on the shooting and bouncing ray technique. The lessons learned apply to a large class of ground targets of interest for millimeter wave radar applications. We summarize the unclassified modeling results and computational requirements at K/sub a/-band frequencies. The ground vehicle simulations indicate that accurate target representations are required to a resolution on the order of the wavelength. In many cases the available data corresponds to near-field measurements. In this case we use the Xpatch near-field simulations to better reproduce the measured radar signatures.