This short course provides a comprehensive overview of advanced digital phased array radar architectures, with emphasis on system-level design, digital beamforming strategies, and practical calibration methodologies required to achieve high-performance operation. The course is designed for engineers, researchers, and graduate students working in radar systems, defense platforms, wireless communications, satellite systems, electronic warfare, automotive sensing, and atmospheric remote sensing applications, where high-performance active arrays and digital beamforming are critical.

The first portion of the course introduces modern digital phased array radar concepts, including fully digital and hybrid beamforming architectures, element-level digitization, channelization, waveform generation, and multi-beam operation. Key performance metrics such as dynamic range, beam agility, sidelobe control, grating lobes, scan loss, surface wave effects, cross-polarization purity, and wideband performance are analyzed from both theoretical and implementation perspectives. Practical considerations such as ADC/DAC selection, RF front-end linearity, timing synchronization, data throughput constraints, and system-level trade-offs are discussed to provide a complete understanding of modern digital array implementations.

The second portion focuses on calibration techniques essential for maintaining array coherence and beam integrity in real-world environments. Topics include amplitude and phase calibration, mutual coupling calibration, channel mismatch compensation, and correction of systematic hardware errors in large-scale arrays. The impact of radome effects on beam distortion, insertion loss, boresight error, and polarization purity is analyzed, along with modeling and compensation strategies. Special emphasis is placed on temperature compensation and thermal drift calibration, including techniques to mitigate phase instability, gain variation, and structural deformation effects in fully digital arrays. Near-field and far-field calibration strategies are examined in detail, including UAV-based far-field calibration methods for fully digital phased array radars, internal loopback architectures, over-the-air calibration, and adaptive/self-calibration approaches. Advanced methods such as model-based calibration, digital pre-distortion, and wideband multi-beam calibration frameworks are presented, supported by real-world case studies from operational radar systems.

Throughout the course, analytical foundations are combined with practical implementation guidance and example datasets. Attendees will gain both theoretical insight and applied strategies necessary to design, calibrate, and maintain next-generation digital phased array radar systems operating in demanding environmental and operational conditions.