Comprehensive Characterization of an Ellipsoidal Cylinder Calibrator for Radar Cross Section Measurement

Abstract

Currently, a set of scaled squat circular cylinders (SCCs) have been widely used for co-polarimetric radar cross section (RCS) calibration in various test ranges where low RCS metal pylons are used. The major drawback of a circular cylinder (CC) is its high sensitivity to elevation angle, as well as the frequency-dispersive theoretical RCS. In this work, we propose a new RCS calibrator, the metal ellipsoidal cylinder (EC), whose RCS characteristics are similar to a metal sphere, while it can be mounted on a metal pylon with little electromagnetic (EM) interactions as a CC does. A high-frequency RCS expression is derived using geometrical optics (GO) for the new calibrator. The scattering mechanisms are analyzed to establish the accurate parametric representation of the theoretical RCS. Based on surface current analysis and numerical calculation, the calibrator-pylon interaction (CPI), the angular sensitivity, and the bistatic RCS characteristics are discussed, enabling the calibration uncertainty evaluation for applying the proposed calibrator in the ground-plane range (GPR). Numerical and experimental results of a manufactured squat EC (SEC) are presented to demonstrate the excellent performance of the proposed EC calibrator for co-polarimetric RCS calibration.