Wide-band VHF scattering from a trihedral reflector situated above a lossy dispersive halfspace

The method of moments (MoM) is used to rigorously analyze wide-band VHF scattering from a perfectly conducting trihedral placed above a lossy, dispersive half space. The method of complex images is employed to evaluate the layered-medium Green’s function efficiently and is applied here to the halfspace problem. Particular attention is placed on the physics that underlie scattering from such targets (as a function of frequency, incidence angle, polarization, and soil type) for cases in which the target is small or of moderate size relative to wavelength (where high-frequency techniques fail). This problem is of interest when conventional trihedrals are employed to calibrate VHF synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems.