Suppression of Mainlobe Deceptive Jammers with SF-RDA Radar

This paper addresses the problem of suppressing main-lobe deceptive jammers based on a novel stepped frequency (SF)-receive delay array (RDA) radar. In our system design, the linear frequency modulation waveform is transmitted with a SF across the transmit antenna elements, and the received echo is delayed with a time shift between adjacent receive elements. In this regard, the range-angle-dependent transmit and receive steering vectors are obtained, making it possible to distinguish the true target and the main-lobe deceptive jammers, especially those generated in the same transmit pulse behind the true target. Furthermore, a joint transmit-receive beamforming method is developed, including the data-independent transmit beamforming and the dimension-reduced data-dependent receive beamforming. Therefore, the jammers are suppressed by nulling in the joint transmit-receive spatial domain. Numerical simulations are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in suppressing mainlobe deceptive jammers.