Adaptive Pulse Compression: Preliminary Experimental Measurements

Preliminary experimental results from the adaptive pulse compression (APC) test bed are presented. A recently proposed adaptive processing technique has been shown via simulation to improve upon current pulse compression techniques through a process known as reiterative minimum mean-square error estimation (RMMSE). The RMMSE technique forms the basis of the APC and the Multistatic APC (MAPC) algorithms. In this paper, we present experimental results demonstrating the feasibility of these approaches. Several polyphase waveforms have been implemented in an experimental test bed. Initial results show that small non-linearities in the waveform generation process have only a marginal impact on the estimation performance of the algorithms. A discussion of the APC test bed followed by experimental results demonstrating the performances of the APC and MAPC algorithms are presented. These initial experimental results indicate that the APC approach is able to successfully mitigate pulse-compression sidelobes on measured data, and that the MAPC algorithm can successfully mitigate both the mutual-interference from shared-spectrum radar signals and pulse compression sidelobes on measured data.