Compression Waveforms for Non-Coherent Radar

Non-coherent pulse compression (NCPC) was suggested recently. It was described using on-off keying (OOK) signals based on Manchester-coded binary pulse compression sequences (e.g., Barker, Ipatov). The present paper expands the discussion on waveform choice for both periodic and a-periodic cases, and on detection performances of this method. OOK transmitter and a receiver based on envelope-detection, suggested for the NCPC system, are simpler to implement than a binary phase-coded transmitter and a coherent receiver with I&Q synchronous detector, required for coherent pulse compression. NCPC can be used in simple radar systems where Doppler information is not required, in direct-detection laser radar systems and in ultra wide band (UWB) radar. Non-coherent processing has drawbacks in cases of reflections from multi-scatterer targets. The drawbacks and means of mitigating them are considered in section II.