Staggered PRT beam multiplexing on the NWRT: comparisons to existing scanning strategies

Beam multiplexing (BMX) is a way to take advantage of the electronic scanning capability of a phased array antenna to collect nearly independent samples. This can lead to reductions in errors and/or scanning time. A new BMX scanning strategy is introduced to address some of the limitations of earlier BMX strategies. The staggered PRT BMX strategy (SBMX) consists of the transmission of sets of three pulses (using two PRTs) which are separated in time. Staggered PRT processing is used for velocity dealiasing. In this paper, SBMX is compared to both conventional staggered PRT and a contiguous-pulse range unfolding strategy. Both simulations and real weather data collected using the National Weather Radar Testbed (NWRT) are employed for the comparisons.