Main-Lobe Cancellation of the Space Spread Clutter for Target Detection in HFSWR

High-frequency surface wave radar (HFSWR) has been successfully developed for early warning, especially for monitoring the moving vessels. However, it can be blinded by space spread clutter (SSC) which can cover a wide looking directions, such as sea clutter and ionospheric clutter in HFSWR. A few methods have made great efforts for SSC cancellation, but these efforts make no sense for the clutter in main-lobe that is a long-standing problem. In this paper, a spread clutter estimated canceller (SCEC) based on single notch space filter has been developed for SSC cancellation to cancel the clutter in the main-lobe with the idea of estimating the SSC in the looking direction through the ones in side-lobes. The feasibility of the idea has been described and demonstrated by the results of simulations and measured data which make great significance for target detection and tracking.