LOW PROBABILITY OF DETECTION AND COVERT RADARS OVER ATMOSPHERIC TURBULENCE CHANNELS BASED ON INCOHERENT LIGHT SOURCES

The low probability of detection (LPD) and covert radars concept based on incoherent, broadband thermal optical sources is proposed. The main idea behind our proposal is to hide the radar signal in the background solar radiation by employing the thermal broadband source followed by the EDFA (of 10 dB bandwidth 39.2 nm), modulating the broadband thermal source output beam by a phase-shift keying modulation format at high-speed, and employing the cross-correlation approach in detecting the target. At the University of Arizona campus we developed a terrestrial free-space optical (FSO) testbed to demonstrate the proposed technique. The adaptive optics is utilized to improve the tolerance to atmospheric turbulence effects. The experimental verifications indicate that the proposed LPD/covert radar concept is operational even in beyond strong turbulence regime.