On full decoding of truncated ranges for ST/MST radar applications

In a coding system that uses a complementary code pair of length N, the first N-1 sampled ranges are not normally fully decoded due to truncation. However, these ranges can be fully decoded by performing two processing stages. In the first stage, the truncated ranges are partially decoded and during the second stage, the vector of the fully decoded values is obtained as a product of the vector of the partially decoded values and a decoding matrix. Three performance parameters appropriate to the full decoding of truncated ranges are considered. These are the signal-to-noise power ratio degradation of the truncated ranges, the interference suppression performance of the codes, and a parameter related to the magnitudes of the elements of the decoding matrix which may influence the complexity of implementation. It is shown that by choosing suitable code pairs significant performance improvements can be obtained