Time-Domain Motion Compensation of HF-Radar Doppler Spectra for an Antenna on a Moving Platform

The effect of sinusoidal platform motion on the first- and second-order high-frequency radar cross-sections per unit area was derived for the monostatic case in the works of Walsh et al. [1]-[2], and more recently for a dual-frequency platform motion model, as well as for a bistatic configuration, in the works of Ma et al. [3]-[4] In all these works, the cross-sections on a floating platform were expressed as a Doppler-domain convolution of the fixed radar cross-section with an infinite weighted sum of Bessel functions of the first kind. Herein, the effect of platform motion is more easily expressed as the product of the time-domain radar cross-section per unit area and a single zeroth-order Bessel function of the first kind for each frequency component of the platform motion. A representative result using this new expression, shows that motion compensation may be performed exactly up to numerical error in the time domain by performing division on the autocorrelation of the received electric field by a known function in the time-domain dependent on the periodic platform motion.