Improving airborne radar performance using multiple conformal receive apertures

Adaptive airborne processing has mainly focused on planar arrays with equally spaced elements and equally spaced sub-apertures. However, current airborne platforms could provide greater capability with limited system impact, if their current radars were complemented with multiple receive-only conformal apertures. Because of aerodynamic constraints, these receive-only apertures must be unevenly spaced. Simulation results demonstrate the degradation in space-time adaptive processing (STAP) performance caused by the unevenly spaced sub-apertures. The impact of overall antenna distortion is also investigated. A STAP compensation algorithm is developed and its performance quantified.