OVERVIEW

With the possible exception of the first radar demonstration in 1904, all early radar experiments were of the bistatic type. They were conducted nearly simultaneously and totally independently by the United States, United Kingdom, France, the Soviet Union, Japan, Germany, and Italy. Japan, France, and the Soviet Union actually deployed bistatic forward-scatter fences, and Germany deployed a bistatic hitchhiker, all for aircraft detection in World War II. Even the British Chain Home monostatic radars had a reversionary bistatic mode. As is well documented[l, 25, 159], development of the monostatic radar, with its fundamental, single-site operational advantage, followed the early bistatic radar experiments, and by the end of World War II all bistatic radar work had stopped. Since then bistatic radars have had periodic but modest resurgences when a specifie bistatic application was found attractive, or when the concept was simply rediscovered; the resurgence cycle appears to be about 15 to 20 years [1].

The first resurgence oecurred in the 1950s, when bistatic radars were developed and deployed again as forward-scatter fences, as semiactive homing missiles, and as precision test range instrumentation and satellite tracking Systems. These last Systems were configured as multistatic radars. The term "bistatic" first appeared in 1952 [34]. Then, in the 1970s, bistatic radars were developed in response to the new antiradiation missile threat [220]. Experimental Systems were tested, but not deployed. The bistatic concepts of puise chasing and clutter tuning were also tested; the hitchhiking concept was retested. A new multistatic instrumentation System for precision...