A maximum-likelihood beamspace processor for improved search and track

The authors describe a two-stage digital beamforming architecture for use in radar. The first stage uses digitized subarray voltages to form a number of highly overlapped adaptive beams. The beams are themselves adaptively weighted during the second stage. Maximum-likelihood processing is used in the second stage to estimate target amplitude and angle of arrival. It is shown that the new architecture supports improved search and track performance compared to traditional systems that use a single receive beam and monopulse processing to measure angle.