Novel ECCM Techniques for Ground-Based Radars

Propagation Research Associates, Inc., (PRA) proposes to develop a combination of waveforms and beamforming techniques that will mitigate both broadband noise and coherent jamming. PRA will focus the development of ECCM techniques applied to the Firefinder EQ-36 radar using the Multi-Mission Radar (MMR) Advanced Technology Objective (ATO) prototype system as a test bed. PRA will propose a suite of ECCM techniques that can either be implemented into the EQ-36 radar with slight modification or can be implemented in future radars that are designed with these ECCM techniques in mind. For coherent jammers PRA proposes to randomize the fast (intra-pulse) and slow (inter-pulse) time-waveform structure to prevent a coherent jammer from capturing the transmit pulse or dwell. PRA proposes using pseudo-orthogonal codes to randomize a combination of time, frequency, and phase. Pseudo-random pulse coding will prevent a coherent jammer from covering the signal pulse. Continuous noise and coherent jamming techniques must be treated differently due the inherent nature of these two ECM approaches. Since noise jamming is essentially a statistical process, any ECCM mitigation technique must be statistical as well. PRA proposes to use adaptive beamforming and space-time adaptive processing techniques that will use covariance information to null broadband jammers.