Digital Chirp Rate Adaptation for Optimum FMCW Interception Using Wigner-Hough Transform

Abstract

Low Probability of Intercept (LPI) radars can hide their emissions from threat intercept receivers and radar warning receivers and Frequency Modulated Continuous Waveform (FMCW) is one of the most common waveform structures they use. FMCW LPI radars use different chirp rates for different requirements like range resolution and doppler resolution. In this work, we investigate the effect of chirp rate on Wigner Hough Transform based ES systems' FMCW signal intercept performance. We define ES Receiver (ESR) Digital Chirp Rate (DCR) concept, find the chirp rate interval that maximizes the interception performance and finally we propose an adaptive method for improving intercept performance of the Wigner-Hough Transform (WHT) based methods using ESR-DCR concept.