Bandpass Signal Sampling and Coherent Detection

Coherent detectors in radar and communications receivers are generally implemented in the form of two parallel baseband channels which form in-phase (I) and quadrature (Q) components of a received RF/IF signal. Phase errors of several degrees due to imperfect matching of these separate channels limit the performance achievable from signal processors such as moving target indicators (MTI), coherent integrators, Doppler filters, antenna array processors, and coherent sidelobe cancellers. Thus methods in which a single analog to digital (A/D) converter samples and digitizes the IF signal directly, eliminating the need for IF to baseband conversion, have been of recent interest and are the subject of this paper. To obtain accurate coherent detection from IF samples taken near the Nyquist rate requires interpolation based upon a number of stored samples. An algorithm derived from sampling theory is defined and used to demonstrate accurate reconstruction of the original IF signal from digitized samples. In-phase and quadrature components of the signal are shown to be available from processed samples with demonstrated phase errors less than 0.2°.