Ultra-High Frequency Clutter Model for Airborne Surveillance Radar

The RDRTec team proposes in Phase 1 to develop a conceptual design for a standalone UHF Clutter model that supports Phase 2 efforts to demonstrate real-time generation of geo-spatial clutter signals for direct injection at radio frequency (RF) into the multi-channel E-2D Next Generation Advanced Hawkeye Radar. The variable fidelity Radar Analysis / Simulation Tool (RAST) is available for immediate use for determining the required level of fidelity. RAST has been used on many programs and is the predecessor to: AFRLs Strategic Radar Simulation RLSTAP; Knowledge-Based STAP (KBSTAP); and other Air Force and DARPA tools.This Phase 1 effort will: determine the level of fidelity (number of scatterers, scattering coefficients, scattering geometries, Internal Clutter Motion (ICM), clutter density) required to fully represent clutter environments as well as decorrelation and mismatch induced by the radar hardware and motion of the platform and the antenna rotation that impacts the STAP performance; develop the Phase 2 prototype architecture to support real-time T&E environments with RF clutter injection; and address increasing processing speeds by prototyping processing intensive algorithms in CUDA based Graphics Processing Units.