Bistatic RCS measurement on different background surfaces
Publish date: 2009-12-01
Report number: FOI-R--2785--SE
Pages: 37
Written in: English
Keywords:
- radar
- bistatic
- reflectivity
- RCS
- radar calibration
- Gauss surface
- grass
- X-band
- Lilla Gåra
Abstract
This report accounts for parts of one work package in a Swedish-French cooperation on target and background signatures. The purpose is to report to our partners in this cooperation and to document methods, results and conclusions. The bistatic reflectivity of a PEC surface with Gaussian height statistics having sH=0.0072 m and correlation length L=0.0191 m and of a grass surface have been measured for a series of scattering geometries nominally in the plane of incidence. Three transmitter depression angles, 10°, 20° and 30° have been used together with receiver depression angles from values slightly above the transmitter to 140°, i.e. starting pseudomonostatic conditions and approaching specular geometry at the end of each series. An object-free calibration procedure particularly well suited for bistatic work, which we have previously only tested on calibration objects in pseudomonostatic geometry, has been applied. ISAR imaging and inversion back to RCS data has, together with zero-doppler filtering, been used to check for and remove background contributions. Data has been measured in the frequency range 8 to 12 GHz but due to truncation artefacts only the range 8.5 to 11.5 GHz was used to estimate the reflectivities at 10 GHz. The accuracies of the estimated reflectivities suffer significantly from lacking information on the position of the phase centre, but this could be corrected later once more information is available and a simple method for strongly reducing the vulnerability to this source of error in the future is described. The reflectivity of the Gauss surface increases with transmitter and receiver depression angles, i.e. with the bistatic angle and the bisector depression, although the incoherent part is expected to fall again at high angles. The reflectivities of grass are significantly lower and after some initial increase they form a plateau at -25 to -18 dB depending on the transmitter angle. On approaching the specular geometry the grass signal increases strongly, but this behaviour needs confirmation. The large differences between the two surfaces indicate a need for theoretical models and parameter sets well suited for vegetated surfaces.