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Evaluation of the Multifunction Phased Array Radar Planning Process (2008) / Chapter Skim
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4 Capabilities of Phased Array Radar
Pages 19-25

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From page 19...
... Phased array radars have been used by the military for aircraft surveillance and tracking for some three decades. Figure 4.1a shows a prototype phased array radar for weather observations - the National Weather Radar Testbed (NWRT)
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From page 20...
... Time essentially wasted while waiting to acquire the needed independent data could be employed to acquire data from other beam directions by taking advantage of the fast beam steering capability of phased array radars. Beam Multiplexing (BMX)
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From page 21...
... That allows faster coverage of a given volume of the atmosphere for aircraft surveillance. For aircraft tracking functions, the rapid beam steering capability allows the radar time to be allocated to provide frequent updates on tracks of designated targets, according to criteria that might include such things as priority, location or speed of movement.
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From page 22...
... with spatially diverse pointing angles to provide the capability of averaging with independent samples. As a result of the short dwell times, however, ground clutter filtering can be problematic since conventional filters depend on differences in temporal correlation between weather and clutter signals.
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From page 23...
... ELIMINATION OF BEAM SMEARING Scanning weather radars inherently have so-called beam smearing due to the fact that samples comprising numerous pulses must be collected while the antenna is rotating (Doviak and Zrnic, 2006)
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From page 24...
... Processing the received signals to yield simultaneous narrower receive beams would retain the inherent spatial resolution capability of the system but reduce the time required to scan that sector of the atmosphere. This capability could also be used at all elevation angles for aircraft observations in the terminal area, where again the targets of interest are nearby.
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From page 25...
... The top panels provide the locations of the operational T/R modules, with failures randomly dispersed across the array. The bottom panel gives the antenna pattern for the three different failure ratios (no failure, 20% failure, 40% failure)
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Key Terms

  • array radar
  • array radars
  • radial velocity
  • weather radar
  • array antenna

  • beam steering
  • adaptive sensing
  • beam smearing
  • weather observations
  • ground clutter

  • aircraft surveillance
  • top panels
  • update rate
  • array technology
  • rapid beam

  • beam multiplexing
  • national weather
  • radar testbed
  • monopulse tracking
  • short dwell

  • rapid updates
  • mechanically scanned
  • panels provide
  • lower panels
  • severe clutter

  • numerous pulses
  • graceful degradation
  • spectrum width
  • velocity fields
  • dwell times


    • This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
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