Pulse Compression Method for Radar Signal Processing

One fundamental issue in designing a good radar system is it’s capability to resolve two small targets that are located at long range with very small separation between them. Pulse compression techniques are used in radar systems to avail the benefits of large range detection capability of long duration pulse and high range resolution capability of short duration pulse. In these techniques a long duration pulse is used which is frequency modulated before transmission and the received signal is passed through a match filter to accumulate the energy into a short pulse. A matched filter is used for pulse compression to achieve high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Two important factors to be considered for radar waveform design are range resolution and maximum range detection. Range resolution is the ability of the radar to separate closely spaced targets and it is related to the pulse width of the waveform. The narrower the pulse width the better is the range resolution. But, if the pulse width is decreased, the amount of energy in the pulse is decreased and hence maximum range detection gets reduced. To overcome this problem pulse compression techniques are used in the radar systems. In this paper, the pulse compression technique is described to resolve two small targets that are located at long range with very small separation between them.