Abstract: A subarray synthesis approach with elevation filtering for the non-side-looking airborne radar is presented. This approach is firstly to filter out the near-range clutter by utilizing the elevation freedoms of the plane array, and then to do the STAP work in azimuth space and in the time domain. By so doing, the clutter homogeneous characteristic is enhanced and the covariance matrix can be evaluated easily and precisely, which improves the STAP performance for non-side-looking clutter suppression greatly. Simulation results prove that the improvement factor is enhanced roughly by 30dB when there is no system error.

Key words: non-side-looking array, space-time adaptive processing, clutter suppression