Multifunction-Multimodal Airborne Radar in Maritime/Littoral Environments

To obtain spectrum dominance the U.S. Navy needs to make use of all the Radio Frequency assets on their SWAP-constrained platforms. Thus it is critical that the apertures available can be used as effective active and passive radar, high-data-rate communications, ELINT/SIGINT, ESM and Electronic Protection (EP) and Electronic Warfare (EW) systems. Integrating these capabilities into a single multi-function wideband adaptive aperture has the potential to improve mission performance while reducing size, weight, power. The proposed program will produce a clean-sheet radar design that takes advantage of new solid-state transmitter, arbitrary waveform generator and high-performance embedded computing technologies. To take advantage of the new RF and digital hardware and enable the multifunction capability the proposed program will evaluate and develop new techniques are needed to effectively perform the desired wide range of radio frequency missions.