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Surveillance radar systems equipped with active electronically scanned antenna arrays (AESA) typically operate with low spatial resolution (50 to 100 m). Under these conditions, the data transformation from the radar signal in the frequency, array position and slow time dimensions to the reflectivity map in the range, angle and Doppler dimensions is conventionally performed by a 3-D fast Fourier transform (FFT). In this paper, we consider a radar system equipped with a wide, near-field array, providing high angular resolution, and examine the changes required in the matched filter-based signal processing to accommodate this sensing geometry. Beamforming techniques that include exact, approximate, FFT-based and sparse-array-based matched filter implementations are investigated. Additionally, we consider joint Doppler-azimuth mapping with wide antenna arrays, while the system operates with narrowband waveforms to allow decoupling of range from the other two signal dimensions. In the numerical examples, we demonstrate a 200-m-wide, S-band sparse array capable of achieving 0.03° resolution in azimuth. Processing with a fully coupled, high range resolution system equipped with a wide antenna array will be investigated in a future publication.
Dogaru et al. (Fri,) studied this question.