Mutual coupling effect is an important and intrinsic property of array antenna. Because of its special main beam pointing and the small element spacing required to suppress the grating lobes

the mutual coupling effect of end-fire array antenna arrays is much more serious than that of side-fire array. In this paper

the influence of mutual coupling effect on the pattern of end-fire array is analyzed

and the pattern model of end-fire array with mutual coupling effect is constructed. Then the clutter model considering mutual coupling effect is given and the influence of mutual coupling on the clutter spectrum and STAP (Space-Time Adaptive Processing) performance of end-fire array airborne radar is analyzed. Finally

a mutual coupling effect compensation method based on clutter covariance matrix reconstruction is proposed. The computer simulation verifies the effectiveness of the proposed method.