A low side-lobe array weighted optimization method in sky-wave radar

The typical Sky-Wave Radar receive array require extensive leveling of the terrain in front of antenna for low side-lobe performance. This results in significant costs and may bring environmental crises. Thus, a special sparse array system is commonly adopted in this situation, which is able to avoid engineering cost problem by deploying the array elements only in the relative flat terrain and discarding them in the rough segment. However, the sparse array system commonly brings the degradation of the array side-lobe performance which will cause the target detection problems. In this paper, in order to refine the side-lobe performance, a method to distribute the array elements based on the genetic algorithm for rough terrain arraying is presented first. Then a low side-lobe optimization based on the sub-array weighting method is proposed. The simulation results proves that the arraying and weighting optimization method is able to effectively reduce the side-lobe level for the array on rough terrain.