Wind farm clutter – how do you filter turbine returns?
We are siting a radar near a wind farm and the rotating blades dominate the plot to the point that slow, small targets disappear in the noise.
Vendors keep saying a firmware filter will fix it, but I would rather hear from someone who actually runs a site next to turbines. Did you move the radar, change the waveform, or just live with a reduced sector?
EDIT: increasing the minimum track speed helped a little, but we lost the slow quadcopters we care about most. Not a real fix.
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We ended up blanking the turbine sector entirely and covering it with RF plus acoustic cueing. Not elegant, but the false alarm count dropped overnight.
That is roughly where we are heading. Did the blanking sector cost you any real detections at the edges?
A little at the boundary, but far less than the operator fatigue we had before.
Clutter maps updated seasonally made the biggest difference for us. Blade returns move with wind direction, so a static map is never enough.