b. Performance Potential 



Any modern commercial or military shipboard radar can 

 easily detect fishing boats of the kind postulated for this survey to 

 the radar horizon from the ship, typically 12 to 18 nmi. Similarly, 

 modern ground-based surface search radars, such as the AN/FPS 114 sea 

 surveillance radars developed for the Pacific Missile Test Center (PMTC) 

 by the Navy Electronics Laboratory Center (NELC), can detect the design 

 targets (i.e., 100-ft vessels) of this survey to horizon-limited ranges 

 of 20 to 40 nmi from typical land-based sites. Thus, we assume that 

 this land-based microwave radar potential is already being fully exploited 

 by the USCG (although exploitation of the information-gathering potential 

 of transponders in these applications is not yet complete). 



. Airborne and spaceborne platforms can employ two kinds of 

 microwave radar that represent the state-of-the-art potential for sea 

 surveillance. One is an optimization of existing airborne radar designs 

 to increase the signal-to-clutter ratio (SCR) through improved pulse 

 compression and signal processing specifically for sea surveillance. 

 The second is the class of radars called synthetic aperture radar (SAR), 

 which use pulse compression to increase the energy in the radar return 

 while reducing the effective pulse length to reduce the range extent 

 of the resolution cell, and reduce the azimuth extent of the resolution 

 cell by synthetic aperture techniques that increase the effective^ antenna 

 aperture. 



The capabilities and limitations of microwave radar in 

 general and the performance of these two major classes are summarized 

 in the following subsections. 



37 



