Fully Digital Horus Radar Experiments in Support of DARPA's Beyond Linear Processing Program

In support of DARPA's Beyond Linear Processing (BLiP) Program, a team of several organizations deployed the University of Oklahoma ARRC's fully-digital Horus radar for a series of coordinated experiments that took place in the Winter 2024. Experiments were conducted with an instrumented Learjet aircraft from Phoenix Air, flying prescribed flight profiles. One of the key goals in the BLiP program is to evaluate the performance of aircraft tracking as a function of reduced aperture configurations. To this end, each prescribed flight path was repeated 3 times, and the Horus aperture was reconfigured to 100%, 75%, and 50% for each of the flights. The scans included uniform and staggered pulse-repetition time sequences, to evaluate Doppler estimation performance. This paper provides an overview of the instruments, the data collection activities, and the advanced beamforming scan modes exercised by the Horus radar.