Radar Multi-Beam Receive Arrays

Next generation BMD sensor systems are anticipated to be highly networked. One radar concept has a single or a few illuminators and multiple receive antennas. It is desirable that the receive arrays be electronically steerable and support multiple simultaneous receive beams. Therefore, these future surveillance radars need to be more agile. To meet their mission objectives, they require wideband, multi-polarized, receive arrays that can provide up to 8 beams. Each beam will need to independently steer over a 120degree conical field-of-view with an instantaneous bandwidth of at least 100 MHz over the full operating bandwidth of the array. Our concept will provide 8 independently steerable beams for one polarization and another 8 for the orthogonal polarization. All 16 could be used independently, or some pairs can be combined to get beams of any arbitrary polarization. To achieve these goals, an innovative concept is presented to minimize the size and weight by using active combiners and dividers. Our concept is to design an analog approach for the element level and a digital design for the subarray level. In addition, this new concept will result in a design that will be affordable and low cost for future surveillance radars.