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RadarSim

RadarSim is a radar simulator I wrote to study how a surveillance or fire-control radar actually behaves: when a target is first detected, why a track is lost in a hard turn, how much a self-screening jammer hides an aircraft, what sea clutter does to a sea-skimming missile. It runs the physics look by look, shows the result the way a radar display would, and lets you change the radar while it runs.

The PPI with a fighter pair, a MALD decoy and a chaff cloud

What it models

  • Detection from the radar equation with pulse compression, Swerling 0–4 targets, non-coherent integration and CFAR loss. A target is looked at only when the beam passes over it, so detections and tracks arrive at the real revisit rate.
  • Propagation: ITU-R P.676 gaseous absorption, ITU-R P.838 rain with a P.839 rain height, and line of sight over procedural or hand-placed terrain on a 4/3 Earth.
  • Clutter: constant-γ land clutter, the Oh–Sarabandi–Ulaby bare-soil model, the NRL sea-clutter model, rain volume clutter, all entering through the elevation beam, plus an MTI canceller with the Skolnik improvement factor.
  • Electronic attack: barrage and spot noise jamming with burn-through, DRFM range and velocity gate pull-off, chaff clouds and decoys released during the run.
  • Tracking: track-while-scan with global nearest-neighbour assignment, χ² gating, two-point initiation and Kalman/EKF filters; monopulse angle measurement.
  • Signal level: a coherent pulse-Doppler chain (LFM matched filter, MTI, windowed Doppler FFT, CA/GO/SO/OS CFAR) and range-Doppler SAR focusing.

Every model states its references and validity range in the code, and the test suite checks each one against closed-form results or published values (Validation).

Where to start

If you want to Go to
install it and open a scenario Getting started
learn the window, scopes and shortcuts The interface
see what each shipped scenario demonstrates Built-in scenarios
write your own scenario Writing scenarios
run batches without the GUI or use the library Command line and Python
check an equation Models

Licence and citation

RadarSim is MIT-licensed. If you use it in published work, please cite it using CITATION.cff in the repository.