The effect of land clutter statistics on automatic gain control

Modern radars are rarely able to sample the full dynamic range of observed land clutter. Therefore designers must employ gain control to make best use of the receiver hardware. This paper considers suitable land clutter models for use in the development of automatic gain control for high-resolution radar. The clutter statistics observed by the radar also have an impact on other areas including detection and target classification, but this paper concentrates on the problem of controlling the front-end gain of the radar receiver.