This paper deals with the issues associated with applying space-time adaptive processing(STAP) techniques in airborne thinned array applications. It is pointed especially that if the aperture do not change and the number of half-wavelength included in any interelement spacing is lower than the number of temporal pulses, the rank of clutter covariance matrix remain unchanged, no matter how many active elements are. The FDR algorithm is proposed to process the output data sampling of multiple sparse configurations. The results show when the sparse array has the same aperture as the filled array, if the rank of the covariance matrix of the sparse array is equal to that of the filled array, the performance of the sparse configuration is better than that of the sparse configuration with lower rank. The numeric results show good agreement with the proposed theorem.
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