Patent ID: 8416123

Claim:
A method of operating a radar system comprising: transmitting on a non-scanning antenna beam that illuminates the entire search space; subdividing the search space into a specified number of sectors, each of which is covered by a set of non-scanning receive antenna beams; receiving returns from all targets within each designated sector covered by its set of antenna beams; processing the returns in each receiver to realize range resolution of the transmit waveform; processing returns in each receiver coherently to realize Doppler resolution within a specified processing interval; computing the magnitude or power in each range/Doppler resolution cell in each receiver; combining noncoherently those receiver outputs that cover or overlap in each sector; detecting the presence of a target or targets in the noncoherently combined receiver outputs; tracking each target in range and Doppler in consecutive processing intervals; motion compensating the original coherent radar data associated with each target using the range-Doppler track of that target; processing the motion-compensated coherent data associated with each target to measure both the azimuth and elevation angles of that target; repeating the processing on all targets in all sectors; where target detection, target acquisition, target tracking, and target analysis are being performed on the same data in each sector.