Digital Beamforming Radar Applied in Atmospheric Observation by Event Driven Simulation Framework

A hybrid analog-digital beamforming (ADBF) architecture of active electronic scanning array (AESA) provides a balance between increasing degrees of freedom in digital beamforming (DBF) strategy design and also achieves the desirable receiver sensitivity. ADBF mitigates the complexity of the hardware structure compared to the full DBF structures by retaining the partial advantage of the analog beamforming gain. An illustration of antenna configuration vs. weather-emulated echo in a specific range is shown in Figure 1. An ADBF AESA architecture was designed in Airborne Phased Array Radar (APAR) that provides 56 row-wise analog feed networks. It allows a 20o fan beam in elevation to the sharpest 2.2o pencil beam with DBF capability in elevation and steerable in azimuth to process select high-impact weather cases by an advanced space-time adaptive process (STAP).