Course Description:
Due to their wide range of operational and technical advantages, active antenna systems are now becoming a standard for high performance radar systems. However, this course will show that there is still room for improvement: new architectures can be designed for future radar systems, where modern front-end capabilities would take full benefit from the available agility and diversity – through optimized signal generation and processing techniques – to improve detection of targets and threat analysis in difficult environments.
In the first part, the basic trade-offs governing focused beam and wide beam digital beamforming for multichannel coherent receiving systems will be analysed, and the expected advantages of space-time coding on transmit (e.g. improved resolution in Doppler, range, and angle) will be identified for different operational scenarios.
Space-time waveform generation and coding will then be presented in detail, and illustrated with different basic examples. Special attention will be given to analysing the consequences of space-time coding (fast-time or slow-time) on Doppler-range-angle performances, for different airborne and surface-based applications. The objective here will be to provide the designer with detailed insight in the various possibilities, their respective advantages and limitations, and implications on hardware requirements.
The specific properties of wideband waveforms will then be identified, with special attention to ambiguities and to clutter cancellation, and combination with space coding will be shown to provide additional benefits for small targets extraction, separation and classification in adverse environments.
In conclusion, areas for short-term applications and requirements for future research will be identified, and followed with a discussion with the audience about advantages and limitations, and relations with adjacent areas of research, such as MIMO antennas, UWB radar systems, and frequency resources allocations.
Who should attend:
This course is intended for researchers, radar designers, and program managers interested in obtaining additional insight into active antenna radar systems capabilities.
Throughout the lectures, intuitive reasoning and simple examples will be preferred to analytical demonstrations to provide the audience with an insider understanding of the basic properties and trade-offs.
Instructor Biography:
Prof. Francois Le Chevalier |
François Le Chevalier is in charge of the Chair “Radar Systems Engineering” at Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands), and Scientific Director of Thales Air Systems Division in Rungis (94), France. Mr. Le Chevalier began his career at the Office National d’Etudes et de Recherches Aérospatiales (Onera), where he initiated research on radar target and background signatures processing. In 1986, Mr. Le Chevalier joined Thomson-CSF (now Thales), where he pioneered French developments in adaptive digital beamforming and STAP radar systems demonstrations, and shared apertures and multisensor concepts design and validation. In 1998, he joined the Airborne Systems group, as Scientific Director, in charge of advanced research and developments coordination (airborne radars, electronic warfare, airborne mission systems). He chaired the Scientific Committee of the International Radar Conference, Brest, 1999, and he has been active in the Technical Program Committees of major radar international conferences (recently: Radar 2007 in Edinburgh, Great-Britain, IRS 2008 in Wroclaw, Poland, Radar 2009 in Bordeaux, France, Eurad 2009 in Roma, Italy, and Radar 2010 in Washington DC, USA). |
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An author of many papers, tutorials, and patents in radar and electronic warfare, Prof. Le Chevalier, an Emerite member of the Société des Electriciens et des Electroniciens (SEE), is the author of a book on “Radar and Sonar Signal Processing Principles” published by Artech House in 2002. |
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