Clutter properties for STAP with smooth and faceted cylindrical conformal antennas

Conformal antennas, which assume the shape of the platform, have several advantages; like reduced weight and space, aerodynamic design and increased field of view. We are interested in detection of moving ground targets with air-borne radar with faceted or smooth vertical half-cylinder or planar antennas with different subarray sizes. We simulate radar systems and study clutter properties which are important for suppressing the clutter with STAP (Space-Time Adaptive Processing), properties by which we can compare the antennas. We use old analysis tools and propose some new which are easy to interpret and draw conclusions from. We find that the faceted and smooth half-cylinder antennas have no significant differences in clutter suppression performance. The plane antenna has poorer performance. The subarray division is more important than the antenna geometry. The number of antenna channels is related to the clutter rank and the clutter fraction of the signal space.