Integrated sidelobe ratio in noise radar receiver

One of the most important characteristics of a radar signal is sidelobes level. It is known that it is possible to build a noise signal generator with power spectrum shape close to Gaussian. Such signal can provide rather low sidelobe level. On the other hand, it is well known that randomness of noise signals leads to randomness of resulting range profiles which is observed as residual fluctuations of autocorrelation also called as processing noise or noise floor. Increase of signal time-bandwidth product leads to decreasing of such residual fluctuations. Residual fluctuations can be a big drawback of noise signal for some applications and can be neglected in other ones. Mostly, this depends on possibility of using high time-bandwidth product of signal in the application. Current work is dedicated to numerical and experimental investigation of properties of noise signal. Because residual fluctuations are spread over the range profile, we have chosen such parameter as integrated sidelobe ratio of the signal (ISLR) to be used for analysis of the signal performance. We estimated ISLR for modeled noise signal with various parameters. Besides, through analysis of reference channel of existing noise radars we estimated ISLR for real systems.