MESAR adaptive nulling/digital adaptive architectures

MESAR (multifunction electronically scanned adaptive radar) is the UK active phased array demonstrator programme. It employs advanced digital adaptive beamforming and has demonstrated the full potential of adaptive nulling technology. The author describes the MESAR adaptive nulling architecture. The MESAR application is then used to compare two parallel approaches to digital adaptive beamforming. The performance of a systolic array of specialist devices performing QR decomposition is compared with a coarse grain array of more standard devices employing a covariance matrix based algorithm. It is found that the coarse grain approach has significant advantages