The Effect of Staggered PRF's on MTI Signal Detection

Long-range surveillance radars use MTI techniques to detect moving targets in a clutter background. The transmitter PRF is usually staggered to eliminate the blind speeds due to aliasing of the target and clutter spectra. A spectral analysis of the target and clutter signals is performed for the case of nonuniform sampling, and it is shown that the clutter spectral density continues to fold over at the basic PRF, but the signal spectrum becomes dispersed in frequency, which means that an MTI rader will never be completely blind to moving targets.