Advances in Airborne Radar Simulation

Airborne Radar Simulation, in the present context, is the real-time generation of radar displays and other radar outputs, such as data exchanges with the flight computer or other avionics subsystems, consistent with the actual radar and in response to the interaction with the operator, ownship, targets, and the environment. The primary application is flight simulators for man-in-the-loop training of pilots and radar operators. The focus of this paper is Air-To-Ground radar modes and thus the Digital Radar Landmass Simulator (DRLMS). It provides a brief overview of the evolution of radar simulators from the acoustic systems of the early 1950’s to those based upon the general-purpose workstations of the 1990’s. This is followed by a discussion of state-of-the-art radar simulator hardware and software architectures. The paper concludes with a discussion of some recent radar advances that challenge the radar simulator designer, including Doppler Beam Sharpening (DBS), Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), and Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR) modes, and the Electronically Steerable Array (ESA). These challenges are being met with innovative databases and signal processing algorithms that are described in the paper.