MITIGATION OF TARGET ILLUMINATION AND MULTIPATH ERRORS IN GROUND PLANE RCS MEASUREMENTS

摘要

The close proximity of the ground to the radar antenna and the target under test is often hard to avoid at an outdoor RCS measurement range. Ground reflection of energy from the antenna leads to target illumination errors, and target-ground interactions lead to multipath errors. By proper positioning of the antenna and target, ground reflections of the antenna illumination can be exploited to increase overall system sensitivity by concentrating more energy on the target; however, this is only effective for narrowband measurements over a limited target region. Reducing target-ground interactions by increasing the target height above the ground generally has limits due to mechanical restrictions on both the radar antennas and the target.rnThis paper will present a model-based data post-processing technique to mitigate illumination errors and target-ground interactions in ground plane range RCS measurements. The algorithm is an extension of the network model multipath mitigation technique previously developed for indoor RCS measurement ranges. The technique will be described and demonstrated using a numerical simulation of the RCS measurement of a canonical target over a ground plane.