Radar Systems Design and Engineering

This four-day course briefly touches on most of the important issues in the broad subject area of airborne radar, including:

• Hardware units (antenna, receiver, etc.)
• Waveform design (choice of radio frequency and pulse repetition frequency)
• Environmental effects (radar clutter, atmospheric effects)
• Radar applications (ground mapping, target tracking, weapon delivery)
• Simulation of radar performance
• The fundamentals of multi-target tracking principles are covered, and detailed examples of surface and airborne radars are presented. 

Benefits include:

• An up-to-date view of the key issues involved with airborne radar design
• System-level insight without lengthy mathematical derivations
• Discussion of recent developments, such as low observable and low probability of intercept design

• What are radar subsystems.
• How to calculate radar performance.
• Key functions, issues, and requirements.
• How different requirements make radars different.
• Operating in different modes & environments.
• ESA and AESA radars: what are these technologies, how they work, what drives them, and what new issues they bring.
• Issues unique to multifunction, phased array, radars.
• State-of-the-art waveforms and waveform processing.
• How airborne radars differ from surface radars.
• Today's requirements, technologies & designs.

• Introduction to Radar. Basic Radar. Functions and Terminology. Examples and Applications of Radar. Range and Range Rate calculation. Basic Radar Block Diagram and Hardware Units.
• Accuracy vs. Resolution. Principles of Electromagnetic Radiation. Refraction vs. Reflection. Decibels. Gain/Loss. Choice of Radio Frequency. Atmospheric and Back-scatter Effects. Radar Antennas.
• PRI/PRF. Range Gating. Detailed Radar Block Diagram. Peak vs. Average Power. Radar Range Equation and the Detection Process. Police Radar Example. • Introduction to Phasors. I/Q Decomposition. Range and Doppler Ambiguities. FM Ranging. Pulse Compression.
• The Doppler Effect. The Pulsed Spectrum. Translation to Video Frequencies. • Digital Filters and the FFT. Additional Information on Range and Doppler Ambiguities. Introduction to Radar Clutter.
• Effect of PRF upon Clutter. PRF Selection. Discussion of Low and Medium PRFs. PFA and PD calculation. I/Q Gain and Phase Imbalance. A/D Conversion.
• High PRF. Introduction to Target Tracking. Low Observable Radar Design Considerations.
• Radar Detection Figures of Merit
• Radar Signal and Data Processing
• Introduction to Synthetic Aperture Radar
• Special Topics, including a Detailed Discussion of Radar Clutter
• Multiple Target Tracking. Definition of Basic terms. Track Initiation: Methodology for initiating new tracks; Recursive and batch algorithms; Sizing of gates for track initiation. M out of N processing. State Estimation & Filtering: Basic filtering theory. Least-squares filter and Kalman filter. Adaptive filtering and multiple model methods. Use of suboptimal filters such as table look-up and constant gain. Correlation & Association: Correlation tests and gates; Association algorithms; Probabilistic data association and multiple hypothesis algorithms.

• Managers and technologists seeking a broad overview of airborne radar
• Entry-level engineers who have little or no background in radar
• Subsystem designers who are looking for a system-level view of radar

Jay Virts, MS, Retired Senior Engineering Manager, Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems, El Segundo, California. Mr. Virts is an expert in the areas of signal processing, radar clutter and performance simulation, algorithm design, flight test data analysis, radar mode design, and development and test of demonstration radar systems. He has been responsible for several government radar technology programs.

Mr. Virts holds a BS in Mathematics from Santa Clara University, MS in Mathematics from UCLA, MSEE in Signal Processing from the University of Southern California, and EEE in Communication Theory from the University of Southern California. He has been an instructor in the Raytheon Learning Institute for more than 10 years, teaching the Introduction to Airborne Radar course.

Stan Silberman is a member of the Senior Technical Staff of the Applied Physics Laboratory. He has over 30 years of experience in tracking, sensor fusion, and radar systems analysis and design for the Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and FAA. Recent work has included the integration of a new radar into an existing multi-sensor system and in the integration, using a multiple hypothesis approach, of shipboard radar and ESM sensors. Previous experience has included analysis and design of multi-radar fusion systems, integration of shipboard sensors including radar, IR and ESM, integration of radar, IFF, and time-difference-of-arrival sensors with GPS data sources, and integration of multiple sonar systems on underwater platforms.