Phased array radars in France: present and future

The beam agility of phased arrays eases fast time sharing between search, acquisition and tracking modes for radars in a varying environment. For ground or surface applications requiring full azimuth coverage, Thomson-CSF designers chose rotating antennas instead of multi-faceted ones. Innovative designs, such as the RADANT prism, have been developed for the to-day phased arrays. To achieve high reliability and improved performance, active arrays are developed, using solid state T/R modules. Furthermore, by processing digitally the transmitted signals and/or the received ones, such arrays permit space/time signal processing for better parasitic signal cancellation, target resolution and non-cooperative recognition. These present and future technologies are illustrated by existing equipment (ARABEL, FLAIR, RBE2) and ongoing developments (RIAS), two of them conducted on an international basis (COBRA, AMSAR).