On the Detection Performance Verification of Airborne AESA Radar Systems

Abstract

The detection performance of an airborne radar for air targets is generally evaluated by the cumulative probability of detection. To verify that the radar meets the required detection performance, a number of flight runs are repeated to obtain the detection samples. The number of samples is usually limited due to the constraint on the number of flight runs. Consequently, the estimated cumulative probability of detection can highly deviate from the ideal value (i.e., the probability estimated by infinite number of samples). In this paper, the statistical characteristics of the detection performance depending on a limited number of samples are analyzed for the two representative flight test methods: HM and FD. Based on the analysis, a guideline for radar power budget design to determine the margin is proposed to ensure that the estimated detection performance through the flight test with the limited number of runs meets the required performance.