In this paper

the clutter characteristics of airborne bistatic radar with range ambiguity are analyzed

and a novel clutter suppression method based on maximum likelihood estimation is proposed.Firstly

the amplitude of various training samples including ambiguous ranges are estimated using maximum likelihood estimation.Secondly

clutter of cell under test (CUT) and the corresponding ambiguous ranges are rebuilt by non-uniform frequency sampling.Thirdly

the clutter covariance matrix of CUT is obtained from the rebuilt clutter data.Finally

clutter suppression is achieved by space-time adaptive processing weight from clutter covariance matrix.The simulation results show that the proposed method is more effective than the traditional method for clutter suppression of airborne bistatic radar with range ambiguity.