OTHR impulsive interference detection in strong clutter background

External impulsive interference (IMI) will severely degrade the performance of an Over-the-horizon radar (OTHR), and detection and suppression of IMI in strong clutter environment is the prerequisite for the target detection. This paper proposes a novel method based on the signal subspace properties, aiming at effectively detecting IMI with easy or without clutter suppression. Selective survey on median eigenvalues variation and discarding two largest eigenvalues can suppress clutter and simultaneously show peaks indicating the IMI position, which can be viewed as a joint clutter suppression and interference detection. Its operational performance is evaluated using experimental data from a high frequency surface wave(HFSW) OTHR system.