Spurious Target Generation Due to Hard Limiting in Pulse Compression Radars

A method is presented to calculate the output of a hard limiter if the input consists of a superposition of three phase-coded signals. A detailed investigation is made of the case where the limiter input signals are phase reversal modulated according to a maximum length linear code. It is shown in this case that a false target signal is generated at the limiter output. The amplitude distribution of the false target signal is investigated along with the distribution of the captured true target signals. A digital computer simulation confirms the theoretically predicted effects.