A research on effects of the aperture jitter on the Digital Array Radar

Digital Array Radar (DAR) has the potentiality for performing different function flexibly and will be used more and more in the future. Since the RF sampling usually is adopted in the DAR, it´s necessary to figure out how the aperture jitter affects the system performance of the DAR. This paper introduces the concept of the aperture jitter. According to the structures of the receiving branches of the DAR, the relationship between the aperture jitter and the Effective Number of Bits (ENOB) of the sampled data is given. Taking receiving digital beamforming into account, the effect on the sidelobe level is analyzed as well and useful conclusions are presented. In the end, some measures used to reduce the aperture jitter are discussed.