Computerized Model Demonstrating Magnetic Submarine Localization

A modet is described which consists of an aircraft with flux gate magnetometers mounted on the wing tips and a submarine containing a magnet to simulate the induced and permanent fields of an actual submarine. Equations are developed which enable a minicomputer sampling the magnetometers to calculate the location, depth, and heading of the submarine as the aircraft travels towards it. The real time plotted results are presented.     

Maximum-Likelihood Detection of Unresolved Radar Targets and Multipath

Interference in the form of multipath or uncooperative targets can seriously degrade the angle-of-arrival estimation accuracy of mutiplebeam processors. In this paper, the generalized likelihood ratio test is used to derive a test to detect the presence of interference for multiple beam processors. The detector performance is then analyzed in detail with respect to its dependence on signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), signal-to-interference ration (SIR), and on the relative phase between the target and interfering signals. It is shown that good detection performance can be obtained unless the phase difference between the target and interference signals is either in or out of phase.     

A Decision?Directed Adaptive Tracker

In the design of a tracking filter for air traffic control (ATC) applications, a maneuvering aircraft can be modelled by a linear system with random noise accelerations. A Kalman filter tracker, designed on the basis of a variance chosen according to the distribution of the potential maneuver accelerations, will maintain track during maneuvers and provide some improvement in position accuracy. However, during those portions of the flight path where the aircraft is not maneuvering, the tracking accuracy will not be as good as if no acceleration noise had been allowed in the tracking filter. In this paper, statistical decision theory is used to derive an optimal test for detecting the aircraft maneuver; a more practical suboptimal test is then deduced from the optimal test. As long as no maneuver is declared, a simpler filter, based on a constant-velocity model, is used to track the aircraft. When a maneuver is detected, the tracker is reinitialized using stored data, up-dated to the present time, and then normal tracking is resumed as new data arrives. In essence, the tracker performs on the basis of a piecewise linear model in which the breakpoints are defined on-line using the maneuver detector. Simulation results show that there is a significant improvement in tracking capability using the decision-directed adaptive tracker.     

The Effect of Staggered PRF's on MTI Signal Detection

Long-range surveillance radars use MTI techniques to detect moving targets in a clutter background. The transmitter PRF is usually staggered to eliminate the blind speeds due to aliasing of the target and clutter spectra. A spectral analysis of the target and clutter signals is performed for the case of nonuniform sampling, and it is shown that the clutter spectral density continues to fold over at the basic PRF, but the signal spectrum becomes dispersed in frequency, which means that an MTI rader will never be completely blind to moving targets.     

Interferometer Design for Elevation Angle Estimation

Radars that are developed for the purpose of monitoring aircraft landings in the terminal air traffic control system can be designed to exploit the relatively high signal-to-noise ratio that characterizes the power budgets calculated for such a link. An interferometer using a pair of low gain antennas can be used to obtain passive coverage over a targe azimuth and elevation sector. A large baseline can be used to obtain the desired elevation angle estimation accuracy. In this paper an optimal tradeoff between the width of the subarray aperture and the width of the interferometer baseline is performed that achieves a specified elevation angle estimation error while minimizing the overall height of the interferometer configuration. The algorithm searches through the class of antenna patterns that can be synthesized from so-called finite impulse response, linear phase digital filters. For the specific problem of designing an elevation sensor for monitoring landing aircraft on final approach, the elevation angle can be estimated with no more than 1-mrad rms error when the aircraft is within ± 60° azimuth, 2.5° to 40° elevation, using two 7-wavelength subarray antennas spaced 8 wave-lengths apart. The design of a separate sensor for resolving the interferometer ambiguities is formulated as a hypothesis testing problem and solved using statistical decision theory. A bound on the probability of an ambiguity error is derived that accounts for the effects of ground reflection multipath and receiver noise.