Abstract:

The large ionospheric phase perturbation, leading to serious Doppler spectrum spread in over the horizon radars (OTHR), restricts the application of the OTHR system in ship targets detection. To resolve this problem, the phase evolving function is estimated based on the Toeplitz characteristic of covariance matrix of the data in the near range and azimuth units, and an approach to correct ionospheric phase perturbation without filtering calibration signal is proposed. Simulation results and analysis show that it is effective in improving the performance of the OTHR system for ship targets detection.