Nonuniform pulse intervals and nonuniform frequency steps for managing radar ambiguity properties

The theory of nonuniform or irregular sampling has many new application areas. With pulsed radar, a classic example of nonuniform sampling is staggered PRF which provides aid for MTI or Doppler processing. For example with a conventional surveillance radar, PRF is often too low for decent Doppler analysis due to operational requirement of unambiguous range. This paper discusses a nonuniform sampling scheme that guarantees a desired unambiguous measurement. The approach is applied to two experiments. First, staggering a sequence of PRIs provides desired unambiguous Doppler. Second, range ambiguity is solved correspondingly with a stepped frequency waveform. Of course, one can achieve these by utilizing conventional uniform sampling but with considerably higher number of samples. Results with real pulsed radar recordings prove the applicability of the sampling scheme.