The major difference between pulse doppler and aesa is rate of scanning where the latter takes the crown by scanning both hemispheres simultaneously. BUT, avoiding various types of ground clutter is still difficult for most aesas too.
@gambit
In every radar echo, the Doppler component is always there.
Say you -- the radar -- are scanning two objects. One body is static, the other is moving towards you. You will receive two echoes. The fact that one body has a constant rate of change of motion is not noticed. That was the first radar of WW II days.
A 'pulse Doppler' radar is specifically designed to filter out the Doppler component of every echo in a single scan. If there are 100 echoes, there will be 100 Doppler signals. Even stationary objects with their Doppler signals of zero are processed.
Then we incorporated Doppler signals processing into every radar. We make the PD signals process a subordinate stage of the overall data processing. If the radar is moving, then stationary objects will have greater than zero Doppler signals. Background clutter will have a constant PD rate and this will be classified as -- 'background clutter'. Objects that are moving with any angular perspectives in respect to the radar will standout against background clutter. So if we switch mode on the radar so that it will display only the PD process stage, we have just turned the radar into a PD system.
So with this understanding, PD processing is still problematic even for (p/a)ESA systems. An ESA system has the
HARDWARE advantage of providing faster beam scanning, variable freqs, variable pulse characteristics, etc. The hardware advantage will produce clearer and more refined PD signals for every targets in a single scan, but if the
SOFTWARE is not there to exploit those refined signals, the ESA system is no better than the non-ESA system.
The software has to be there. An ESA system can be superior than the non-ESA at everything, including PD signals processing. But the software has to be matching.