Adaptive clutter and jammer cancellation for element-digitised airborne radar

We describe a novel multi-layer ("domain factorisation") adaptive beamforming method, for an element-digitised array radar (EDAR). This enables adaptive beamforming weights for an array of many hundreds or thousands of elements to be calculated with realistic sample support and computational workload. Range-dependent gain adaption (RDGA) coupled with adaptive weighting of each element of the array permits much more effective cancellation of clutter and jamming than sub-array based space-time adaptive processing. Simulations of airborne intercept (AI) radar demonstrate the power of this approach for detection of small targets against severe clutter and main-beam jamming.