Some Effects of Clipping in Array Processing

The operation of amplitude clipping in array processing is examined to determine (1) the fidelity of the system, (2) the improvement in system performance resulting from a post beam‐forming filter, and (3) the effects of non‐Gaussian noise. It is found that, under suitable conditions, the system fidelity is quite good. The over‐all process is statistically equivalent to passing the signal waveform through a soft amplitude limiter with characteristics determined by the noise statistics and the signal‐to‐noise ratio. It is shown that a post beam‐forming filter can improve the output signal‐to‐noise ratio by nearly 1 dB for narrow‐band signals. For non‐Gaussian noise, the clipping loss can be relatively large. For sinusoidal interference, the clipping loss is between 6 and 7 dB.