Range Sidelobe Reduction Filter Design for Binary Coded Pulse Compression System

Pulse compression is an active research topic in radar systems. A problem in pulse compression is masking of small targets by the range sidelobes of large nearby targets. A new filter structure is introduced here to suppress the sidelobes of radar signals that result from standard matched filtering. The proposed filter is applicable for any type of binary coding signals. Several techniques are used to calculate the filter coefficients such as Wiener filter technique, Lagrange multiplier method, and linear programming (LP) algorithm. Also, a weighting function is utilized to shape the sidelobe energy in an iterative manner that will yield more sidelobe reduction. Comparison of the proposed filters and the matched filter shows that at the expense of insignificant loss in signal-to-noise ratio (LSNR), adequate mainlobe-to-peak-sidelobe ratio (MSR) can be achieved.