A fast method for designing optimal transmit codes for radar

This paper proposes a new method to finding transmit codes for radar. It has been used to find 17 polyphase Barker codes, binary codes up to length 301, and polyphase codes of varying length for constellation sizes 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, and 128. A common method for finding transmit codes is the minimization of the side lobe level. While low side lobes is a necessary condition for low range profile estimation error, it is not the only objective. The method proposed in this paper seeks to minimize the estimation error of a range profile directly, rather than seeking to minimize an implicit quantity. As such, the radar codes in this paper minimize the range profile estimation error, and one of their properties is a low side lobe level.