Modular, Scalable Multifunction Airborne Radar Systems for High Performance ISR Applications

A highly performant multifunctional Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) airborne Radar family concept is presented which concentrates on modularity, scalability, and software defined solutions for multimode flexibility to cope with the challenges of future ISR missions. Thus, such a multifunctional and multimode Radar family has to provide almost all RF Radar functions common for all the variety of missions, aggregated on a single Radar system for different platform types. Apart from a widely independence of platform types and sizes, there is the need that such a system is adaptable w.r.t. its bandwidth and processing power and is also freely configurable w.r.t. Radar control. Furthermore real time onboard processing is needed to handle acquired large raw data volumes for instantaneous evaluation of ISR results. Hensoldt's new airborne ISR Radar family PrecISRTM presented here covers all of these requirements through the use of a common Radar Core architecture. By means of programmable Radar waveforms and common Radar signal processing framework the bandwidth can be modified as well as the processing performance be scaled by the Radar processor hardware. Advanced features of the Radar family are a 2-D Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) antenna on a 360° Gimbal. Highly adaptable ISR modes are introduced for the multifunctional ISR Radar PrecISRTM 4500 and PrecISRTM 1500, e.g. Space Time Adaptive Processing (STAP) in 360° Scanning Modes, Pulse-to-Pulse simultaneous Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) - Moving Target Indication (MTI) operations as well as Ultra-High Resolution (UHR) SAR Processing. Surveillance and Reconnaissance performances of Hensoldt's predecessor SmartRadar AESA Pod are presented to illustrate the already exceptional results of these advanced onboard ISR modes.