Cancellation of clutter and e.m. interference with STAP algorithms. Application to live data acquired with a ground-based phased array radar

This paper shows that space time adaptive processing (STAP) can be fruitfully applied also to ground based radar to simultaneously cancel clutter and e.m. interference (e.g.: jammer). This is demonstrated by processing live data recorded by a C-band phased-array radar demonstrator having three spatial channels and few tents of coherent received pulses. The processing is done by emulating, on a software program, a systolic algorithm which is amenable for parallel processing thus allowing us to reach the real time requirement. This paper opens up the way to a more extensive application of STAP which, up to now, has been limited only to radar on board moving platforms. In fact, it can find a role in ground based and shipborne radar where clutter and jammers are contemporaneously present in the radar echoes and their characteristics (e.g.: direction of arrival, power, spectral shape) are not known a priori.