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Automatic Tracking with Air Surveillance Radars

Automatic tracking with surveillance radars can track hundreds or thousands of targets simultaneously over longer periods of time compared to single target trackers, which track only one target. Early air surveillance radars tracked targets manually, but as the number of aircraft increased, automatic detection and tracking (ADT) became necessary. ADT systems use radar to detect targets, extract their coordinates, and automatically track multiple targets over time as the antenna rotates.

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64 views2 pages

Automatic Tracking with Air Surveillance Radars

Automatic tracking with surveillance radars can track hundreds or thousands of targets simultaneously over longer periods of time compared to single target trackers, which track only one target. Early air surveillance radars tracked targets manually, but as the number of aircraft increased, automatic detection and tracking (ADT) became necessary. ADT systems use radar to detect targets, extract their coordinates, and automatically track multiple targets over time as the antenna rotates.

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Uzman Mofeed
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© All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

Automatic Tracking with Surveillance Radars

The tracking is performed by an air-surveillance radar .Tracking with air


surveillance radars is done at much longer revisit time between
observation than [Link] have revisit time times of the order of a tenth
of a second; air surveillance radars have revisit times of few to many
second. The STTs tracks only a single target, the air surveillance radar
may have many hundreds, or even thousands, of targets I track.
ADT is found in almost all modern civil air traffic control radars as well as
military air surveillance radars. The data rate at which observation are
made depends on the time for the antenna to make one rotation (which
might vary from a few seconds to as much as 12 seconds).tracking is done
in open loop in that the antenna position is not controlled by the
processed tracking data.
A long range or a medium range air surveillance radar can have within its
coverage a large number of aircraft targets as well as many individuals
clutter echoes. In the early days of air-surveillance radars, when there
were fewer aircraft in the sky and they did not fly as fast as modern jet,
target tracking was done manually by operating using grease pencils to
mark the position of a target on an each antenna scan, calculate its
speed, and determine its direction. The trainer operator can update a
target track manually at a rate of about once per two seconds. With a
civil air-traffic control radar antenna rotating at the relatively slow rate
of 5 rpm, a good operator might be able to hold in track 5 or 6 aircraft.
Such a rate cannot be sustained, however, for more than about 20 to 30
minutes before the operator’s performance is reduced. When there are
more aircraft than can be tracked manually, automatic methods must be
used for target detection, coordinate extraction, and tracking. This is
called automatic detection and track.
ADT requires a good radar that eliminates clutter echoes and other
unwanted signals. This might sound like an obvious statement that can
be said for many things, but when ADT was first introduced it was
mistakenly applied to the then existing radars which had poor or no MTI,
or any other means for reducing clutter. Its performance was a disaster
when used with poor radars.

Function of ADT
The functions performed by an ADT system include;
1 Target detection
2 Track initiation
3 Track update
4 Track smoothing
5 Track termination

Advantages of ADT
It can simultaneously track a large number of targets might be many
hundred or a few thousand of aircraft.
Disadvantage of ADT
The data rate of ADT is lower than STI, data rate depend on the antenna
rotation of radar.

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