Ship Monitoring With Bistatic Compact HFSWR of Small Aperture

Abstract

High-frequency surface wave radar (HFSWR) can detect and continuously track ship targets in real time and beyond the horizon. Compared with transmit/receive (T/R) monostatic HFSWR, the T-R bistatic HFSWR has the advantages of flexibility, receiver concealment and large coverage because of the separation between the radar transmitter and receiver locations. So far, there is little research on marine ship monitoring for bistatic HFSWR. This study examines ship monitoring performance with T-R bistatic compact HFSWR of small aperture based on measured experimental data. The first-order sea clutter characteristics and detection blind zone for T-R bistatic HFSWR were investigated theoretically, and the formulas for the moving ships were derived and its position accuracy were analyzed from simulation results. The experimental results of ship target detection of bistatic compact HFSWR carried out in 2015 were presented, and the spectrum characteristics of the bistatic HFSWR were analyzed with measured experimental data. A method integrating detection and tracking was applied to the target detection data collected by the bistatic compact radar, and two targets examples tracked were given. Finally, the validity of the method and the tracing results were verified by using synchronous automatic identification system (AIS) data, and the ship positioning accuracy of the bistatic compact HFSWR was statistically analyzed. The analysis shows that bistatic radars have larger errors than monostatic T/R radars, with a positioning error as large as 10 km.