Range-ambiguous clutter suppression with Pulse-diverse waveforms

Abstract

Conventional pulse-Doppler waveforms are the standard for radar detection in clutter due to their inherent robustness, especially to extended-range ambiguous clutter. The attendant drawbacks include coherent ambiguities and blind zones in range and/or Doppler, which require multiple coherent precessing intervals to resolve. Pulse-diverse waveforms, using techniques such as phase coding and nonuniform time offsets, can mitigate these drawbacks but at the cost of a significant reduction in clutter suppression using matched filtering. It is shown here that receive filtering optimized on a per-interval or per-range/Doppler-cell basis can provide these waveforms with clutter suppression over multiple range intervals, at the cost of significantly increased computation. Several examples illustrate the tradeoffs between different types of pulse diversity.