Range Ambiguous Clutter Suppression Approach with Elevation Time Diverse Array

When range ambiguity and range dependence coexist in forward-looking ground moving target indication (GMTI) radar, the traditional space-time adaptive processing (STAP) approaches may fail to work. To cope with this issue, a range-ambiguous clutter suppression approach based on elevation time diverse array (TDA) radar system and azimuth phase coding (APC) technique is presented in this paper. Due to the advantages of frequency scanning, the elevation TDA radar is able to cover all directions by transmitting a single time-shifted waveform. Therefore, a frequency bandpass filter is devised for each single range-bin to achieve the mainlobe echo extraction procedure. In the sequel, the azimuth phase decoding and Doppler filtering are performed to deal with the residual sidelobe ambiguous energy. With two-dimensional filtering, one can extract the unambiguous signals for each range region independently. Then, the traditional clutter compensation and STAP methods are employed to suppress the ground clutter. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed framework in resolving range ambiguity are verified by the numerical simulation experiments.