Near-field scattering characters of the ship

The near-field scattering of ships is a very useful characteristic parameter for theory analysis and measurement. With the MLFMM, the near-field scattering of a typical simplified ship have been simulated to analyze the near-field scattering characters of the ship in free space in different detecting distances and incident angles. And the results show that with reduction of range, the difference between results of near-field and far-field scattering become very prominent. In addition, the required distance between antennas and ships may be far less than traditional far-field distance by comparing mean of scattering results. Accordingly to the phenomena of dominant lobe division of near-field scattering patterns, we developed a new expression to estimate the width of dominant lobe division. Finally, the viability of this expression is also given.