Range sidelobes attenuation of pseudorandom waveforms for civil radars

Abstract

In the last years the solid state technology is entering the marine market with some new coherent radars with solid-state transmitters. They are characterized by a full-digital signal processing making use of FPGA boards that make the whole system very flexible. Solid-state transmitters require pulse-compression and a matched-filter receiver calling for waveforms with a low level of range sidelobes. This need has been addressed in the past with the well-known “chirp”, or Frequency-Modulated signals with a suited non linear frequency law allowing very low autocorrelation sidelobes. But nowadays a different approach is possible thanks to the Noise Radar Technology that uses tailored-at-will noise signals for the medium-long range detection. The tailoring of such signals is implemented by novel, suitable algorithms depending on the particolar application. In this paper a new powerful cyclic algorithm (BLASA) is presented which is able to strongly attenuate the range sidelobes of noisy signals while keeping their bandwidth within given bounds. In this paper, particular focus is given to the marine radar environment in which pulses of different duration are used.