Detection of frequency hopping signals with a sweeping channelized radiometer

The paper presents new performance analysis of a frequency sweeping channelized radiometer when the signal to be detected is a frequency hopping signal. Often technology limits the instantaneous bandwidth that can be used. When frequency sweeping (search strategy) is used, the center (carrier) frequency of the receiver is changed rapidly to increase probability of intercept (POI). Conventional logical OR, sum and maximum based methods are used to combine the channelized radiometer outputs. Exact results are derived for the sum based channelized radiometer. An accurate approximation of the performance of the sweeping maximum based channelized radiometer is presented. Numerical results show that although sweeping increases POI, the final probability of detection is not increased if the number of hops observed is large.