The design and performance evaluation is presented of a partially adaptive array that suppresses clutter from low elevation angles in atmospheric radar observations. The norm-constrained and directionally constrained minimization of power (NC-DCMP) algorithm has been widely used to suppress clutter in atmospheric radars, because it can limit the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) loss to a designated amount, which is the most important design factor for atmospheric radars. To suppress clutter from low elevation angles, adding supplemental antennas that have high response to the incoming directions of clutter has been considered to be more efficient than to divide uniformly the high-gain main array. However, the proper handling of the gain differences of main and sub-arrays has not been well studied. We performed numerical simulations to show that using the proper gain weighting, the sub-array configuration has better clutter suppression capability per unit SNR loss than the uniformly divided arrays of the same size. The method developed is also applied to an actual observation dataset from the MU radar at Shigaraki, Japan. The properly gain-weighted NC-DCMP algorithm suppresses the ground clutter sufficiently with an average SNR loss of about 1 dB less than that of the uniform-gain configuration.

A low complexity multi-user receiver with blind channel estimation and multiple access interference (MAI) suppression is proposed for a CDMA system under multipath fading and frequency offset. The design of the receiver involves the following procedure. First, a method of joint MAI suppression and channel estimation is developed based on the generalized sidelobe canceller (GSC) technique. In particular, channel estimates are obtained blindly in the form of the effective composite signature vectors (CSV) of the users. Second, a low-complexity partially adaptive (PA) realization of the receiver is proposed which incorporates reduced-rank processing based on the information of multi-user CSV's. By a judiciously designed decorrelating procedure, a new PA receiver is obtained with a much lower complexity. Finally, pilot symbols assisted frequency offset estimation and channel gain compensation give the estimate of users' symbols. Further performance enhancement is achieved by a decision aided scheme in which the signal is reconstructed and subtracted from the receiver input data, leading to significantly faster convergence. The proposed receiver is shown to be robust to multipath fading and frequency offset, and achieves nearly the same performance of the optimal maximum SINR and MMSE receivers with a much lower overhead for pilot symbols.