Sea Clutter Suppression for Shipborne HF Radar Using Cross-Loop/Monopole Array

The shipborne high-frequency ground wave radar (HFGWR) provides a better condition for sea surface target detection than the shore-based one because of its maneuverability and flexibility. However, the first-order Bragg spectra of the shipborne HFGWR would be broadened by the Doppler shift of the ship motion, which makes the vessel echo easily submerged. Even though some methods have been applied to suppress the broadened Bragg spectra for target detection, most of them are hard to achieve good result in a small-aperture radar. An orthogonal projection method to suppress the broadened Bragg spectra using a cross-loop/monopole array is proposed in this letter. The proposed method mainly includes two steps: 1) estimate the space of sea clutter in a spatial domain according to the ocean echo characteristics and 2) design an adaptive filter of single or multiple Doppler bins on the estimated clutter space to suppress the first-order spectra. After suppression, we use the multiple signal classification algorithm to estimate the incident direction of targets. The experimental data validate that the sea clutter is well suppressed and the target signal-to-clutter ratio is increased by the algorithm.