A history of battlefield surveillance radar

The technology and system design of radars to survey a battlefield has a relatively short history, starting in about 1968. The early technology was developed to provide detection of both fixed and moving targets, along with discovery and tracking of military positions. And the system operational architecture required either long standoff range or flying on a small, remotely piloted air vehicle. These diverse applications stimulated significant development of lightweight electronically scanned antennas, adaptive detection of targets in severe clutter, and transmission of critical target information over modest bandwidth data links. This paper will summarize these critical technologies that have led to several modern RPV radars.