LPI waveforms for AESA radar

Sammanfattning: The purpose of low probability of intercept (LPI) radar is, on top of the standard requirements on a radar, to remain undetected by hostile electronic warfare (EW) systems. This can be achieved primarily by reducing the amount of radiated power in any given direction at all times and is done by transmitting longer modulated pulses that can then be compressed digitally in order to retain range resolution. There are multiple different methods of performing pulse compression modifying either the phase or frequency of the transmitted waveform. Another method for attaining LPI properties of a radar is to avoid having a large main lobe in the transmit pattern and instead having lower gain patterns. This then results in a need for post-processing of these patterns by summation of weighted combination of these low gain patterns in order to reform the high gain patterns and thus retain angular resolution. In this work a number of pulse compression waveforms are analysed and compared using their ambiguity properties in order to ascertain which ones can be used in a radar system. They are then used in simulation with GO-CFAR detectors using a variety of analysis tools, specifically the short term Fourier transform (STFT), Wigner-Ville distribution (WVD), quadrature mirror filter bank (QMFB) and spectral correlation density (SCD). Their performance against the detector is based on the rate that the waveforms trigger an alarm and the lower the alarm rate the better the performance. The base reference in terms of performance for these evaluations was set as a triangular FMCW waveform. The results show that the polyphase coded waveforms have good radar and LPI properties in comparison to the FMCW. The frequency hopping codes showed good LPI properties with a large number of frequencies in the sequence but suffer from large ACF side lobes and poor Doppler tolerance. The best LPI results were achieved by a phase coded signal with a random order to its phase terms whilst still maintaining a perfect periodic autocorrelation function (PACF). Potential issues remain with high frequency out of band emission that could lead to a mismatch due to receiver bandpass filtering. The low gain patterns investigated were expanded to include two way patterns for a 2D array and array element tapering. The method works and can be further optimised in order to minimise emissions but adds a significant increase to integration times when the array size grows large.