An Adaptive Compensation of Moving Clutter Doppler Shift for Helicopter MTD Radar

The accurate estimation and compensation of the moving clutter Doppler shift are essentials for the moving target detection of the airborne radar system. In this paper, a technique for the real-time estimation and compensation of the moving clutter Doppler shift due to the moving radar platform is presented for the airborne pulsed Doppler radar system. A new algorithm employs the dwell-time based clutter-lock MTD method in order to estimate and compensate the mean Doppler shift within antenna beam dwell time by using high speed DSP based Doppler FFT processing. Through the helicopter-borne radar flight test using real-time radar data acquisition system, the moving clutter Doppler spectrum is measured and analyzed in terms of various operational parameters