A comparison of partially adaptive STAP techniques for airborne element digitised phased array radar

In future there will be a growing requirement to use high levels of spatial and temporal sampling to enable the use of space time adaptive processing (STAP) to improve target detection in complex interference environments. However, in practice, the processing power and training data requirements will restrict the degrees of freedom (DOF) that can be used. A number of algorithms have been developed to take advantage of phased array architectures employing many DOF without suffering from slow processing, poor beam pattern control or inadequate training data. This can be achieved using either adaptive or non-adaptive DOF reduction techniques. We evaluate a number of partially adaptive techniques via simulations with airborne element digitised array radar (EDAR).