Dense false target jamming suppression for airborne superimposed stepped frequency radar

Traditional space‐time adaptive processing (STAP) suffers from severe performance degradation in dense false target jamming scenarios, especially mainlobe deceptive jamming. To solve this problem, the superimposed stepped frequency (SSF) radar is explored and its ability in suppressing the mainlobe deceptive jamming is studied in this work. SSF radar can provide a controllable degree of freedom in range domain besides the traditional freedom in angle and Doppler domains, which can be used to distinguish true and false targets. Thus, the range cascaded STAP approach is proposed to suppress the deceptive jamming and the clutter. First, the true target and clutter are blocked in carrier frequency domain. Then, the jamming is attenuated by the adaptive filter in carrier frequency domain with the jamming covariance matrix being constructed by the blocked data. At last, the clutter can be suppressed by the cascaded STAP in the space‐time domain. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed radar framework and the processing approach in suppressing the clutter and jamming.