Seahawk Overview
Seahawk is an applied mathematical technique which improves the performance of any radar that uses it.
Initial work has been done on a class or radar that transmits a pulse of radio energy, using a directional antenna and then listen for the echoes before slightly rotating the antenna and transmitting the next pulse.
The two metrics of a radar's performance are its ability to detect targets and its ability to resolve them when they are close to each other in either range or bearing.
The former is largely determined by the ratio between the strength of a target's "echo" and the noise created by the radar's receiver (the signal to noise ratio).
In the case of "pulse radars", the latter is determined in range by the length of the transmit pulse and the bandwidth of the radar's receiver and in azimuth by the width and shape of the beam of the directional radar antenna. For other kinds of radar, such as FMCW, the antenna characteristics are similar and range resolution is determined by corresponding characteristics.
For those interested, a theoretical comparison, commissioned by a comparative-website owner and much published on the internet is reproduced here.
Seahawk improves the signal to noise ratio and reduces the effective beamwidth of antenna. By so doing it improves the two metrics of detection and resolution.
That has been tried before and, in some sense has been a "Holy Grail" of radar signal processing. However, before Seahawk all attempts either required precise knowledge of the characteristics of the host radar OR they introduce target-like artefacts (and some did both). Seahawk uses a novel signal processing technique that is barely concerned with the host radar's characteristics and does not introduce artefacts.
Whilst it is clearly not sensible to describe how Seahawk works on a website, it is possible to demonstrate its capability with a few images that compare processed with unprocessed. Those are offered in two sections: "Leisure Marine" and "Shore Surveillance"