Ambiguity Removal When Using Burst Waveforms. Part I: Coincidence Detection

The uniformly spaced burst waveform provides excellent clutter rejection in cases where the clutter and targets are separated in velocity. However, it has the major disadvantage that an object at one range (at or near the search velocity) will give returns up and down range from the search range. If a simple threshold detection scheme is used which decides that an object is present at a location when the return at the corresponding time crosses a threshold, then a single object will give rise to many detections. (We shall call the detections at the ranges other than the true range of the object ambiguous detections, or ambiguities.) There are two classes of techniques to remove these ambiguities: those operating with a single transmission and those requiring additional transmissions. This correspondence considers the coincidence detection procedure which requires the transmission of two bursts with different pulse spacings. The detection and ambiguity removal performance of this algorithm is considered in detail for the case of scintillating targets.