Transmit beamforming for range ambiguous clutter mitigation in forward-looking STAP radar

In forward-looking space-time adaptive processing (STAP) radars, range ambiguity causes range bins far from the target of interest to contribute additional energy to the target range cell and training data. This additional energy can severely degrade target detection performance due to the different angle-Doppler characteristics of the clutter. In this work, we study the use of transmit beamforming to help overcome this problem by designing an elevation beampattern which does not illuminate the ambiguous ranges. This beampattern design has a low complexity solution and provides improvements in clutter training data homogeneity and total received clutter energy.