A radar system is provided that uses configurable radar control software. The radar system may continually adapt over time to perform different types of radar mission by re-configuring the radar control software with mission specific configuration data. A configuration database may be provided to store the configuration data for retrieval during mission transition operations.

A system including a radar system. The radar system may include a transmit antenna, a receive antenna, and a controller. The controller may be configured to: determine or obtain information indicative of at least one of a phase of flight or an environmental condition; determine or obtain information indicative of a mission associated with the determined phase of flight and/or environmental condition; and based at least on the determined mission and the determined phase of flight and/or the environmental condition, tune radar parameters of the radar system to values to fulfill the determined mission associated with the determined phase of flight and/or environmental condition. The radar system may be reprogrammable by tuning the radar parameters to operate over any of a collection of phases of flight, any of a collection of environmental conditions, and any of a collection of missions.

An imaging method using a doppler radar wherein the pointing direction in transmission (d.sub.ei) is modified from recurrence to recurrence; each detection block of duration T comprises a periodic repetition of a number C of pointing cycles, each of these cycles comprising a number P of recurrences, the set of these P recurrences covering the D.sub.e pointing directions (d.sub.ei) of the set; the order of the pointings is modified in a pseudo-random manner from pointing cycle to pointing cycle during a same detection block so as to create an irregular time interval between two pointings in a same direction; at least one beam is formed in reception on each recurrence in a direction included in the transmission-focused angular domain in the pointing direction corresponding to the recurrence.

A method for operating a target-detection radar following a first radar mode and a second radar mode corresponding to Doppler modes, the method including the implementation of several recurrences of a signal emission/reception operation, each N-th recurrence of said operation including the following sub-operations: generation of two consecutive pulses associated with different radar modes and different emission directions, emission of the pulses in different frequency bands, the pulses associated with different radar modes are emitted using different polarizations, and reception in a common time window of the echoes of the pulses.