Introduction to Airborne Radar is the revision of the classic book privately published by Hughes Aircraft Company in 1983. Lavishly produced in full color, the book was quite unlike any commercially published radar book produced by the major technical publishers.

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The combination of clear, understandable writing and the unparalleled illustrations established the text-reference as a "must-have" for engineers, technicians, pilots, and even sales and marketing people within the radar and aerospace industry. The book was authored by veteran Hughes engineer and Technical Manager George W. Stimson, a publications specialist. Individual chapters were thoroughly reviewed by the appropriate experts within the Hughes Radar Systems Group.

The book was initially available 1983-1987 only to those within the Hughes family: employees and customers, primarily the military. Restriction was lifted in 1987. Hughes went through three printings and 40,000 copies 1983-1993, mostly by word-of-mouth testimonials and demand. Upon retirement from Hughes, George Stimson successfully negotiated for the rights to the book and made an agreement with SciTech Publishing to do a major revision of the text to update it. The resulting Second Edition has been overwhelmingly positive and a best-seller.

Second Edition

The revision is extensive: thirteen entirely new chapters cover the technological advances over the fifteen years since publication, two chapters considered obsolete have been deleted entirely, three chapters are extensively rewritten and updated, two chapters have been given new sections, and fourteen chapters have been given minor tweaks, corrections, and polishing. The book has grown from 32 chapters to 44 chapters in 584 efficiently-designed pages. Efforts have been made to bring more even-handed coverage to radars developed outside of Hughes Aircraft, while older and less important Hughes radars have been deleted or abbreviated. Chapter 44 catalogs many of the cutting edge radars in functioning aircraft and near-service aircraft in early stages of production.

Audience

The book's appeal is to a diverse audience: from military pilots and radar officers eager to gain a sound technical understanding of the complex systems that their lives depend upon, on up through technicians, marketing, and sales people, to the radar system design specialists, who may "know all that stuff" but who deeply admire the expression and thus use the book to teach others who have questions. The market encompasses companies directly involved in the radar business and those on the periphery, college professors of engineering and physics themselves, along with students in aviation, aeronautics, and electromagnetics and radar courses. The cross-disciplinary and multi-level demand for the book shows that the book should not be pigeon-holed as just a radar book for electrical engineers. Virtually anybody with a knowledge of high school algebra, trigonometry, and physics will be able to read and absorb most of the material

Key Features

This book is unique in two important respects:

First, it is the only text published that completely covers the wide range of techniques employed in modern airborne and space-based radar. Most similar books emphasize ground-based radars or else cover only a narrow aspect of airborne radar, e.g., radar range performance or Synthetic Aperture (Array) Radar. In fact, much of the Stimson book is applicable to surface-based radar as well, particularly the first fourteen chapters concerned with general radar principles.

Secondly, it fulfills the need of all those who want to learn about radar, regardless of their technical backgrounds. That is, it has sufficient technical depth and mathematical rigor to satisfy the instructor and the non-specialist engineer. Yet, as long as readers have gone as far as elementary algebra and know a little physics and trigonometry, they can painlessly get to the point where they can talk on a sound footing with radar experts and understand what they're up to.

Approach & Organization

Starting from scratch, and in bite-sized increments, the early book chapters present in easily grasped, largely physical terms, all the information one needs in order to understand the basic radar principles. More knowledgeable readers can skip this early material. Building upon these principles in a similar fashion, the book proceeds to systematically provide readers with a sound physical understanding of virtually all of the advanced radar techniques:

• pulse compression


• monopulse operation


• electronic beam steering


• coherence


• pre-detection integration


• digital filtering


• waveform design for clutter rejection


• precision tracking


• high-resolution SAR ground mapping


• inverse SAR (ISAR) imaging


• bistatic detection


• slow ground-moving-target detection and tracking


• missile guidance


• electronic warfare


• radar design for stealth


• advanced processor architecture


• photonic needs for active ESA's


• small signal detection


• sensor fusion


• sidelobe and mainlobe jamming cancellation

INTRODUCTION
PART I: OVERVIEW
Ch. 1 Basic Concepts (new sections added) 3
Ch. 2 Approaches to Implementation 15
Ch. 3 Representative Applications (chapter significantly updated.) 35
PART II ESSENTIAL BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Ch. 4 Radio Waves and Alternating Current Signals 49
Ch. 5 Key To A Non-mathematical Understanding of Radar 59
Ch. 6 The Ubiquitous Decibel 71
PART III: RADAR FUNDAMENTALS
Ch. 7 Choice of Radio Frequency 83
Ch. 8 Directivity and the Antenna Beam 91
Ch. 9 Pulsed Operation 107
Ch. 10 Detection Range 115
Ch. 11 The Range Equation: What It Does and Doesn't Tell Us 135
Ch. 12 Pulse Delay Ranging 151
Ch. 13 Pulse Compression 163
Ch. 14 FM Ranging 177
PART IV: PULSE DOPPLER RADAR
Ch. 15 The Doppler Effect 189
Ch. 16 Spectrum Of A Pulsed Signal 199
Ch. 17 Mysteries of The Pulsed Spectrum Unveiled 209
Ch. 18 Sensing Doppler Frequencies 235
Ch. 19 How Digital Filters Work 253
Ch. 20 The Digital Filter Bank & The FFT 267
Ch. 21 Measuring Range Rate 281
PART V: The Problem of Ground Clutter
Ch. 22 Sources & Spectra of Ground Return 293
Ch. 23 Effect of Range and Doppler Ambiguities on Ground Clutter 309
Ch. 24 Separating "Slow" Ground Moving Targets From Clutter 317
PART VI: AIR-TO-AIR OPERATION
Ch. 25 The Crucial Choice of PRF 325
Ch. 26 Low PRF Operation 335
Ch. 27 Medium PRF Operation 355
Ch. 28 High PRF Operation 369
Ch. 29 Automatic Tracking 383
PART VII: HIGH RESOLUTION GROUND MAPPING & IMAGING
Ch. 30 Meeting High Resolution Ground Mapping Requirements 393
Ch. 31 Principles of Synthetic Array Radar 403
Ch. 32 SAR Design Considerations 425
Ch. 33 SAR Operating Modes 431
PART VIII: RADAR IN ELECTRONIC WARFARE
Ch. 34 Electronic Countermeasures (ECM) 439
Ch. 35 Electronic Counter Countermeasures (ECCM) 457
Ch. 36 EW Intelligence Functions 469
PART IX: ADVANCED CONCEPTS
Ch. 37 Electronically Steered (Phased) Array Antennas (ESAs) 473
Ch. 38 ESA Design 481
Ch. 39 Antenna RCS Reduction 493
Ch. 40 Advanced Radar Techniques 499
Ch. 41 Advanced Waveforms & Mode Control 519
Ch. 42 Low Probability of Intercept (LPI) 525
Ch. 43 Advanced Processor Architecture 535
PART X: APPLICATIONS
Ch. 44 Representative Radar Systems 545
APPENDICES

George Stimson was hired by the Hughes Aircraft Company in 1951 to write a widely circulated technical periodical called the "Radar Interceptor."� Working closely with the company's top designers over the next 39 years, he witnessed first hand the fascinating evolution of airborne radar from simple systems to the advanced pulse-doppler systems of today. Following his retirement in 1990, he has remained active in the field, teaching a short course at the National Test Pilots School in Mojave. He continues to write, and completed the article on radar for the 1998 edition of the Encyclopedia Americana.