Beam Squint Mitigation Using Digital Beam Formers for Wideband Radar Applications

In modern phased array radars, digital beamformers are used for beam steering in transmit and receive operations. Most of the conventional radars operate in narrowband applications with phase shift beamformers. The high-resolution imaging radars operating with wide bandwidths suffer from beam squint with phase shift beamformers. In this work, a methodology is proposed to address this effect through suitable corrections in the frequency domain. The focus is given for receive beam formation with squint correction using Linearly Frequency Modulated waveforms. The paper includes the analysis of beam squint with various parameters like bandwidth and steering angle. This is supported with results and associated discussions obtained at different stages of analysis.