Effect of array errors on performance of 2-D processing in airborne radar and compensation method

For an airborne planar array radar, the array errors will increase the DOF (degrees of freedom) of received clutter, and lead to losses in 2-D (two-dimensional) adaptive processing performance. In this paper, the effects in several 2-D processors are discussed. By comparing, it is shown that the suboptimum 2-D approaches are much more sensitive to array errors than the optimum 2-D approach. To compensate the errors, we extend the suboptimum approach described by Sun, Peng and Liu (see IEE Electron Lett., no.17, p.1551-1553, 1993) to a 3-D domain and a simplified 3-D approach is proposed. The simulation results show that the new 3-D approach is more robust than the 2-D one