HF Radar ship tracking with
measurements from two or more radars

When bearing measurements are not very accurate (as sometimes is the case) one can use accurate simultaneous monostatic and/or bistatic radar measurements of the range and radial velocity from several (at least two) nearby radar sites.

Anacapa developed a fast, high fidelity algorithm that processes pairs of radar measurements from multiple radar sites to accurately calculate the ship position as well as velocity magnitude and heading in real time.

The video below shows an example of these calculations. In this example, RADAR ONE measures both the monostatic and bistatic range (from RADAR TWO) to the ships. RADAR TWO also measures the monostatic range to the ships, so for each time increment there are three independent range and radial velocity measurements.

At each time increment, first the Anacapa ship detection software (ASDS) will, in real time, process pairs of radar measurements to calculate three independent ship locations and vector velocity estimates. Then the Anacapa ship tracking software (ASTS) will then determine if these new potential ship locations are part of the already formed ship tracks paths, or possibly the start of a new one.

The yellow dots in the video are potential ship locations, determined by the ASDS, that have not yet been assigned to be part of a ship track.

The remaining symbols represent separate ship tracks, as determined by the ASTS.