High duty waveform design for active array airborne surveillance radars

Future airborne surveillance radars are likely to be composed of solid state active element transmitters with sub arrayed receivers for adaptive processing. To give sensitive detection performance these radars will be required to operate at high duty to deliver high mean powers. This poses new problems for surveillance waveform designers. Two approaches in designing high duty scheduled waveforms are presented. The first approach is by best practice. Equations for high duty waveform design are given. A second approach was taken that used an evolutionary algorithm to optimise to a solution by evaluating a set of waveform performance metrics. A sensitivity metric, modelling adaptive radar detection performance using simplified empirical and algebraic models is presented. Following this a Ghosting/decodability metric is described which uses a novel assessment method for determining a waveform's susceptibility to ghosts and decode problems. Results of both approaches are given throughout.