Costas CW frequency hopping radar waveform: peak sidelobe improvement using Golay complementary sequences

The use of Golay complementary sequences to encode Costas frequency hopping continuous waveforms (CW) in order improve the range (time) sidelobe behaviour of received radar signals compared to classical techniques such as Barker coding is investigated for the first time. Sidelobe reduction is quantified using the aperiodic autocorrelation function and the periodic autocorrelation function. The results are compared with the same frequency hopping waveform encoded with a 13-bit Barker code. The results show that a 16 dB improvement in peak sidelobe performance is achieved over Barker coding using Golay complementary sequences with a code length of only 2³ and a 26 dB improvement with code length 2⁸.