Unique calibration issues for bistatic radar reflectivity measurements

This paper addresses the calibration of bistatic radar measurements performed on far field ground plane ranges. In a previous paper we developed an equation for calibrating bistatic radar cross section (RCS) measurements using monostatic calibration measurements. In this paper we express the error sources for bistatic calibration in terms of a standard for estimating radar measurement errors for monostatic systems issued in 1994 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), to develop an equation for estimating absolute bistatic errors and perform an estimate of the accuracy of a modern RCS instrumentation system.