Historical overview and current research on noise radar

The concept of noise radar with coherent reception of radar returns starts its history as early as in 1950s. The first papers on range-measuring radar based upon noise signals were published by Richard Bourret in 1957 who applied CW noise waveform along with its correlation reception and by B.M. Horton in 1959 who also used CW noise signal, but being used for frequency modulation along with so called anticorrelation method for signal processing. Horton recognized that one way to eliminate range and Doppler ambiguities was to use random noise as the modulating function and perform range determination by cross-correlating the return signal with a time-delayed replica of the transmit waveform. In his seminal paper in the May 1959 issue of the Proceedings of the IRE entitled “Noise-modulated distance measuring systems” on pages 821-828, he derived the fundamental concepts and proposed several implementations.