Introduction to radar cross-section measurements

A HF/VHF direction finding antenna with optimised radar cross section

“…The modell was scaled by the factor s = 4.5 in order to meet farfield conditions in a 25 m long chamber. Therefore the frequency was scaled to the range from 9 GHz up to 40 GHz, and the resulting RCS must be scaled by the factor s 2 [3]. Moreover fourier transformation and range gating were performed, and the object was mounted with material which has an ǫ r close to air as well as specially placed and formed absorbers to obtain only the RCS of the object (figure 4).…”

Radar cross section measurements

“…Polarization plays an important role in RCS characteristics; in recent years, polarization processing techniques have been developed to discriminatetargetsfrom the surrounding clutter background [6]. Dimensional scalingtechniques have long been applied to RCS measurements [4]. Scale models are more manageable to handle during measurements and the increased frequency also reduces the required size of the measured facility.…”

Proposed Standards for Ladar Signatures

“…The original RCS (211 was defined so that the only radiation considered at the receiver was the component polarized parallel to the plane wave field incident on the scatterer. This convention is still widely used [22]. Some other standard references, however, do not make this distinction as to polarization [23,271, implying that the total scattered signal (both linear polarizations) is considered in defining the cross section.…”

“…The scattering cross section, as given by Blacksmith [22], is identical to the RCS of eq. (6) with the exception that w (Oro r ) now represents the total reflected (scattered) radiant flux density regardless of polarization,…”