Range-Ambiguous Clutter Suppression with Pulse Phase Coding Based on ULFDA-STAP Radar

This paper proposes an improved range-ambiguous clutter suppression method based on uniform linear frequency diversity array(ULFDA)-space time adaptive processing(STAP) radar by applying the pulse phase coding(PPC) technique, which increases the number of range ambiguities that can be addressed. Firstly, range-ambiguous clutter is separated by employing a frequency increment across the elements in the transmitting spatial frequency domain. Moreover, PPC is applied to further improve the performance of range-ambiguous clutter separation in the transmit-Doppler two-dimensional plane. In the sequel, the clutter corresponding to each ambiguous range region is independently compensated and suppressed since range-ambiguous clutter has been separated. The proposed method doubles the number of range ambiguities that can be resolved compared to the traditional ULFDA-STAP radar. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.