Factors Affecting the Effective Clutter Rank for Planar and Conformal Antennas with Subarrays

The Effective Clutter Rank (ECR), the number of eigenvalues of the clutter covariance matrix larger than the white noise, has important consequences for the radar system when suppressing clutter with Space-Time Adaptive Processing (STAP), in terms of cost, complexity, usability and performance. In this paper some factors affecting the ECR are studied by simulations. The result is partly explained by theory from the literature. The main results are: 1) Factors affecting the ECR [subarray beam pointing direction, subarray design, antenna geometry, # radar pulses, PRF, radar velocity and target range]. 2) Differences between planar and conformal antennas. 3) A simulation-based rank calculation method for antennas with subarrays.