A Study on the Application of Time Modulated Antenna Arrays to Airborne Pulsed Doppler Radar

The time modulated (TM) linear arrays with variable aperture sizes (VAS) are applied to the airborne pulsed Doppler (PD) radar system in this paper. The VAS arrays which have great flexibility in the control of the aperture excitations are employed to synthesize low/ultra-low sidelobe patterns in the PD radar system, and the optimized time sequences obtained via the differential evolution (DE) algorithm is used to minimize the average power loss due to the time modulation. Numerical simulation results of the signals transmitted and received by PD radar based on the VAS arrays show that the time modulation changed the waveforms of the signals in time domain but the received signals also contain the correct range and velocity information of the moving target.