Concepts for Pulse Interleaving Radar Modes

Situational awareness in a littoral environment requires radars to not only detect and track surface vessels but also to discriminate and, if possible, perform classification. To this end multi-mode radars were developed that perform: Wide-area surface surveillance (Maritime Moving Target Indication (MMTI) for detection and tracking, High Range Resolution (HRR) for discrimination, and Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR) for further discrimination and possible classification. The difficulty has been in optimally allocating time and beam pointing space for accomplishing these different modes. This proposal takes advantage of state-of-the-art hardware and proposes a pulse-by-pulse mode interleave capability.