Publications

Today's tactical military air surveillance radars generally operate in a stand-alone configuration. The many performance improvements that result when data from multiple radars of this type are merged have made such netted operations an attractive goal for many years. A major obstacle to achieving this goal has traditionally been the difficulty associated with the registration of multisensor data, the expression of the data in a common coordinate system free from errors due to site uncertainty, antenna orientation, and improper alignment. This report presents the results of a modest effort to develop a self-registration procedure by which multiple radar sensors operating in consort each calculate the errors In their data by comparing it with data from the remainder of the system and then uses the information to upgrade performance. The technique has been tested with experimental data and appears quite capable of improving system performance, measured in terms of residual inter-site bias errors, by almost a factor of one hundred.

Lincoln Laboratory has been examining digital data extracted from operational ARTS-III radar beacon processing systems for the past eighteen months, in an attempt to determine the capabilities of today's civil Air Traffic Control Radar Beacon System. Our original report on the subject, "Empirical Assessment of ATCRBS," (Ref. [1]), covered data gathered during the first six months of the study from the Andrews AFB (ADW), Boston (BOS), and Las Vegas (LAS) ARTS-III eqUipment. This report discusses analysis of data received since the completion of that initial report, which was gathered at the Ontario, California (ONT), Albuquerque (ABQ), Minneapolis St. Paul (MSP), Milwaukee (MKE), and Boston (BOS) ARTS-III sites, and also the Suitland, Md. en route radar site. The major topics considered here are false targets caused by multipath reflections, and asynchronous interference (fruit). Four different mechanisms resulting in false targets were observed in the data and are discussed in detail in the report. In addition, levels of asynchronous interference as measured and analyzed, and two procedures are discussed by which the characteristics of the interrogators responsible for the fruit (including location) can be determined. One of these is described in detail, and shown to yield results that agree closely with known parameters. Several other topics, including improper reply decoding, are also discussed.

Lincoln Laboratory has been assisting the U.S. Air Force Weapons Laboratory in the study of ATCRBS false targets caused by reflections from buildings at Albuquerque International Airport/Kirtland AFB. This paper discusses the false target situation there and proposes two algorithms for correcting it in ARTS-III software. The simpler of the two appears applicable to the Albuquerque situation today, and is easily extendable to correct false targets caused by new buildings. Since the process appears directly applicable to many FAA Secondary Radar installations, a more complex algorithm is also presented, which is suitable for use in very high density terminal areas.

This report discusses the operational performance of the FAA ATCRBS system, as determined from data extracted from the ARTS III digital processing system. Data was gathered from several sites including Andrews Air Force Base, (Md.), Logan International Airport (Boston, Mass.), and McCarran International Airport (Las Vegas, Nevada). Quantitative performance data, as well as discussion of the problem area and possible techniques and procedures for its solution, are provided in the areas of weak/broken targets, false targets, synchronous garble, interference, erroneous decoding, improper defruiter operation, and insufficient angular resolution. A discussion of improvements that can alleviate some of the deficiences of today's secondary radar (ATCRBS) system is included.