A space/fast-time adaptive monopulse technique (Q871509)

Summary: Mainbeam jamming poses a particularly difficult challenge for conventional monopulse radars. In such cases spatially adaptive processing provides some interference suppression when the target and jammer are not exactly coaligned. However, as the target angle approaches that of the jammer, mitigation performance is increasingly hampered and distortions are introduced into the resulting beam pattern. Both of these factors limit the reliability of a spatially adaptive monopulse processor. The presence of coherent multipath in the form of terrain-scattered interference (TSI), although normally considered a nuisance, can be exploited to suppress mainbeam jamming with space/fast-time processing. A method is presented offering space/fast-time monopulse processing with distortionless spatial array patterns that can achieve improved angle estimation over spatially adaptive monopulse. Performance results for the monopulse processor are obtained for mountaintop data containing a jammer and TSI, which demonstrate a dramatic improvement in performance over conventional monopulse and spatially adaptive monopulse.