An ultra-low sidelobe pulse compression technique for high performance radar systems

A pulse compression technique based on deconvolution and linear prediction in the frequency domain is presented which offers approximately 20 dB improvement in time sidelobe performance compared to conventional matched filter and windowing techniques. The detection performance converges to that of a matched filter for weak signals, while the sidelobe level decreases to very low levels as a function of the signal strength. The performance of the deconvolution method has been studied using measured radar data from the Rome Laboratory Surveillance Facility, and is shown to be a practical technique for future radar systems. Issues such as sensitivity to target Doppler frequency, range cell straddling, dispersion in analog transmit and receive channels, and A/D converter errors are analyzed and the results presented.