Return Home

About this course

Why is airborne radar so distinctly different from surface-based radar? Why is Doppler processing so important, so vital, to airborne radar? Why are “medium prf waveforms” used so much, when they are so obviously ambiguous in the usual radar measurements? How does radar imaging work from airborne and space-borne radars?

Questions like these are quite common among radar persons, even those with some considerable experience in other areas of radar.  What’s more, those quite new to radar entirely could well proceed with their work and miss the intrigue and challenges unique to this application, and fail to appreciate the excitement of accomplishments in this area.

In this valuable course, these questions are answered, albeit rather qualitatively, in the very first session, and then developed more carefully in the lectures to follow.  By the conclusion of the course, the student will fully understand the fundamentals of all radar, the practical impact of putting such equipment into aircraft and spacecraft in the first place, and then both the demands (for clutter rejection, for example) and the opportunities (for imaging, say) inherent in simply flying over the earth!

Outline

First Day:

• Introduction to radar generally and the challenges and opportunities of airborne radar specifically; the major types of airborne radar (AEW, AI, others); electromagnetic waves and how we represent them; radar composition, block diagrams; quantifying radar performance and the statistical nature of detection.
• Scattering and propagation; the nature of clutter, statistical models, dependencies; introduction to signal processing, coherent and noncoherent processes; pulse compression; Doppler  processing basics.

• Airborne radar signal processing; quantifying the Doppler effects, understanding the pulse-repetition-frequency (prf) choices; handling ambiguities in both range and Doppler dimensions; the Woodward ambiguity function.
  
• Class exercise: an example airborne radar and our design of an appropriate waveform for it.

• Advances in airborne radar: the achievement of high resolution in several dimensions; how imaging works, SAR; ISAR; image problems (e.g., ground moving targets); image enhancement; polarimetry briefly; dimensions associated with space-borne radar, a notional SBR.
  
• Advances in waveforms, in high resolution detection processes; phased arrays and active apertures; some example developments underway.

The course is taught as though students might be quite new to radar; it IS a fundamental course. Of course, some radio or radar experience is helpful but engineers and technicians even in fields other than radar should have no difficulty with this instruction. Elementary algebra and some trigonometry are helpful, as is some understanding of statistics and statistical inference. The instructor is quite experienced in teaching these principles to persons of very little experience. Managers, even ones not technical specialists, charged with oversight of work related to airborne radar development would profit greatly by this exposure.

How to Register

To register for this course, please fill out the registration form and return it to NICTA Industry Education Manager (fax it to +61-8-8302-3115 or scan and email it industryeducation@nicta.com.au).

Cancellation Policy

At least four weeks notice is required for cancellation of a place in a short course for full reimbursement. If cancellation is later than 4 weeks then the place can either be given to another person or the registrant can be provided with a credit towards other NICTA training.