Space-time adaptive processing with a half-cylinder faceted conformal antenna

Conformal antennas, which assumes the shape of the platform, have several advantages, like reduced weight and space; aerodynamic design and increased field of view.We are interested in detection of moving ground targets with air-borne radar with three antenna geometries: faceted or smooth vertical half-cylinder and plane forward-looking. We study important clutter properties for suppressing the clutter with STAP (Space-Time Adaptive Processing) and find that the subarray division is more important than the antenna element positions, that the faceted and smooth antennas give similar clutter properties and that all three geometries have better clutter properties the smaller the subarrays are. The largest tested subarrays are probably useless for clutter suppression.