Medium pulse repetition frequency (MPRF) is an important mode in airborne radar system. Since MPRF mode brings both Doppler and range ambiguities, it causes difficulty for the airborne radar to suppress ground or sea clutter. In recent years, it has been pointed out that the frequency diverse array (FDA) radar is capable of separating the range ambiguous clutter, which is helpful for the airborne radar in detecting weak moving targets originally buried in ambiguous clutter. To further improve the ambiguous clutter separation performance, an enhanced pre-STAP beamforming for range ambiguous clutter suppression is proposed for the vertical FDA planar array in this paper. With consideration of range dependence of the vertical spatial frequency, a series of pre-STAP beamformers are designed using a priori knowledge of platform and radar parameters. The notches of the beamformers are aligned with the ambiguous clutter to extract echoes from desired range region while suppressing clutter from ambiguous range regions. The notches can be widened by using covariance matrix tapering technique and the proposed method can improve the performance of range ambiguous clutter separation with limited degrees-of-freedom (DOFs). Simulation examples show the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Enhanced Pre-STAP Beamforming for Range Ambiguous Clutter Separation with Vertical FDA Radar