Characterization of the receiver filter of a X-band weather radar to improve the performance of an application to control the radar stability

This paper describes a technique developed to understand if a radar receiver filter is tuned or not, manually detuning the receiver central frequency and statistically analyzing the power distributions of Ground Clutter echoes observed in clear sky conditions. Statistical parameters characterizing such distributions are quite sensitive to the radar receiver filter detuning, in particular the 90^th percentile. Other indicators, such as the mean and the median can be adopted to distinguish between clutter echoes coming from different type of targets.