Effects of processing errors in the quadrature sampling of complementary coded radar signals

Phase coding and linear frequency modulation in analog or discrete form are widely used in power-limited radar systems for pulse compression to achieve high range resolution. Such coded waveforms are detected by appropriately matched filtering of the in-phase and the quadrature samples derived from the received signal. Complementary codes have generated such interest in the area of high-resolution radar signal design. There are, however, no published results to judge the robustness of this coding scheme in the presence of quadrature channel imbalance. Monte Carlo simulation results are presented to fill this gap. It is concluded from the results that although the degradation in the case of complementary codes increases more rapidly than for Frank codes, complementary-coded waveforms have better overall performance than Frank-coded waveforms in the presence of sampling errors