Acquisition of Sarsat Information Using an Auto-Correlation Based Adaptive Line enhancer

This paper develops a new approach to the detection of the emergency locator transmitter (ELT) signal using an adaptive line enhancer (ALE). The input signal to the ALE is replaced by its autocorrelation function (ACF) because noise affects the central samples of the autocorrelation function only while it affects all samples of the noisy signal. This gives the ALE the ability to get rid of noise, easily. The output ACF is then used in the spectral estimation and detection of the ELT signal. This approach is related to the signal processing using Higher Order Statistics (HOS) since the ACF is the used input. The paper also compares the results of the new approach to other different previously used methods foe ELT signal detection. The first method uses the signal xk as an input to the ALE, and the second method uses xk. Results illustrate the superiority of the proposed method over the other two methods. A comparison study between the performance of two types of ALE; Fixed pole radius and variable pole radius ALEs in detecting the ELT signal, is introduced.