Solid state pulse Doppler radars for maritime traffic surveillance - Review of architecture and trade-off analysis

Maritime traffic surveillance radars are in use for several decades, they are mostly based upon magnetron pulse emitters and simple non coherent signal processing. While the lack of coherent signal processing capabilities is compensated by strong pulse power, there is still a demand for improving detection and tracking performances especially in front of heavy sea clutter for detecting small and evasive targets. The solutions that address such demands are based upon the use of solid state transceivers which allow to generate and to process specifically designed waveforms incorporating for example frequency or phase codes.