Alleviating the effect of transient background for detection enhancement of nondeterministic chirp signals

A major source of false-alarms in various radar applications is due to sudden noise spikes that cover wide frequency bands. These transient signals have high amplitudes and occur at random time instants. This leads to erroneous detection decision. In this paper, we study the influence of amplitude limiting the noisy signal on reducing the received false alarms and enhancing the detection performance. We address this problem in the context of detecting chirp signals that are encountered in a bistatic radar which we are developing for remote sensing of cosmic ray induced air showers. In this paper, the radar experimental system is introduced. In addition, modeling and emulation of radar target return echoes is studied. Finally, the emulation results of the system performance are presented and analyzed.