Realisation of Digitised Airborne AESA through Multi Channel Receiver

The paper discusses the methodology of transforming an Airborne Active Electronically Scanned Antenna Array(AESA) with RF manifolds into a digitized AESA. The modified design of Beamforming Unit (BFU) provides systematic grouping of the RF outputs from the bays directly to 8 digital receive channels along with 2 Guard channels which allows adoption of state-of-the-art algorithms such as Space Time Adaptive Processing for radar. This provides enhanced capability for radar detections in cluttered environment. BFU has been modified keeping the same form factor as earlier to meet the structural requirement of the Antenna array.