SIMPLE PROCEDURES FOR RADAR DETECTION CALCULATIONS

The literature of radar contains results of Rice, Marcum, Swerling, and Schwartz in several families of curves, which permit radar engineers to estimate the signal energy ratio required for a given level of detection performance. The variety of radar problems, however, makes it impractical to construct curves for all combinations of radar and target parameters. The concept of detector loss is used here to evaluate losses attributable to integration and collapsing, with an accuracy of ±0.3 dB on steady targets. This is added to a separate fluctuation loss, modified for diversity effects, to obtain results on all Swerling target models and also on partially correlated targets. The accuracy of the combined losses is ±0.5 dB for a wide range of detection and false-alarm prob-abilities. Starting from the basic single-sample detection curves, only three additional graphs are needed to find the energy ratio for given detection performance in any of these cases. Examples are given which show the ease with which different radar options may be compared as to performance on an arbitrary type of target. Copyright © 1969 by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.