Year
1990
Abstract
As the perimeter protection of high value assets has gained attention, it has become apparent that significant vulnerabilities exist from airborne attack. The use of conventional doppler radar sensors to counter this threat has significant limitations. GRC has developed a concept for the detection of low flying, low cross section intruders which is based on the use of a dispersed network of inexpensive bista tic radar sensors. Position and velocity are measured by the radar network on the basis of doppler information only. Extensive system simulations have shown that 1 square meter cross section intruders can be tracked with typical position location accuracy of 10 to 100 meters and velocity accuracy of 1 to 5 meters per second within a 100 square kilometer measurement cell. Recent experimental measurements have verified the ability to detect light aircraft in a intense urban clutter environment. This concept offers the advantages of robust low altitude detection, operation beyond line of sight, hardware simplicity, low cost, and graceful degradation of performance in the event of hardware failure. It represents an attracive alternative to monostatic radar approaches.