A Multipath Spread Doppler Clutter Suppression Method for Skywave Over the Horizon Radar

This paper analyzes the production mechanism of the multipath Spread Doppler Clutter (SDC) in skywave Over The Horizon Radar (OTHR). Because the amplitude and phase errors always exist in the array and the power of desired signal (sea clutter) is greater than the power of SDC, the SDC suppression ability declines through conventional Adaptive Digital Beam Forming (ADBF) process, at the same time, the desired signal is weakened and Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) is seriously decreased. To resolve the above problems, an adaptive SDC suppression method is proposed. In this method, an improved Noise Subspace Fitting (NSF) method is utilized to eliminate amplitude and phase errors of OTHR array, and the direction of arrival angle of desired signal and SDC can be accurately obtained. Then, orthogonal projection weight vector is used in ADBF to solve the problem that conventional ADBF weight vector can not be accurately estimated because of the strong desired signal. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the scheme can completely suppress multipath SDC.