Near Real Time Visualization of RF Terrain Model

Not Available Future naval combat systems will include wideband radars for high range resolution (HRR) target detection and discrimination functions. However, such functions in large arrays cannot be supported by conventional narrowband beamsteering techniques. TSC proposes a new approach to beamforming in which photonic wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology is used to implement an affordable true time-delay (TTD)-assisted synthetic wideband (SWB) HRR radar receiver. SWB processing is a means of increasing the effective bandwidth of existing narrowband phased arrays through time-domain multiplexed radar waveforms. However, SWB alone poses severe technical challenges in radar resource allocation, dwell times, and overall accuracy. Full TTD beamforming, on the other hand, is intrinsically wideband but has proven prohibitively costly to implement on a large scale. By combining the two beamforming approaches, a HRR radar receiver will be developed requiring only partial TTD implementation to achieve performance comparable to a truly instantaneously wideband system. This will involve synthetic wideband processing to reduce the level of instantaneous bandwidth required for HRR, while implementing partial TTD to reduce the difficulties inherent in the SWB approach by effectively reducing the aperture size. Photonic WDM technology for partial TTD offers significant advantages in cost, performance and availability over other techniques.