To analyze the influence of time synchronization error, phase synchronization error, frequency synchronization error, internal delay of the transceiver system, and range error and angle error between the unit radars on the target detection performance, firstly, a spatial detection model of distributed high- frequency surface wave radar (distributed-HFSWR) is established in this paper. In this model, a method for accurate extraction of direct wave spectrum based on curve fitting is proposed to obtain accurate system internal delay and frequency synchronization error under complex electromagnetic environment background and low signal to noise ratio (SNR), and to compensate for the shift of range and Doppler frequency caused by time-frequency synchronization error. The direct wave component is extracted from the spectrum, the range estimation error and Doppler estimation error are reduced by the method of curve fitting, and the fitting accuracy of the parameters is improved. Then, the influence of frequency synchronization error on target range and radial Doppler velocity is quantitatively analyzed. The relationship between frequency synchronization error and radial Doppler velocity shift and range shift is given. Finally, the system synchronization parameters of the trial distributed-HFSWR are obtained by the proposed spectrum extraction method based on curve fitting, the experimental data is compensated to correct the shift of the target, and finally the correct target parameter information is obtained. Simulations and experimental results demonstrate the superiority and correctness of the proposed method, theoretical derivation and detection model proposed in this paper.

Due to the motion of the platform, the spectrum of first-order sea clutter will widen and mask low-velocity targets such as ships in shipborne high-frequency surface-wave radar (HFSWR). Limited by the quantity of qualified training samples, the performance of the generally used clutter-suppression method, space–time adaptive processing (STAP) degrades in shipborne HFSWR. To deal with this problem, an innovative training sample acquisition method is proposed, in the area of joint domain localized (JDL) reduced-rank STAP. In this clutter-suppression method, based on a single range of cell data, the unscented transformation is introduced as a preprocessing step to obtain adequate homogeneous secondary data and roughly estimated clutter covariance matrix (CCM). The accurate CCM is calculated by integrating the approximate CCM of different range of cells. Compared with existing clutter-suppression algorithms for shipborne HFSWR, the proposed approach has a better signal-to-clutter-plus-noise ratio (SCNR) improvement tested by real data.