Analysis of a CFAR correlation radiometer

The two antenna correlation radiometer is used detecting unknown signals but its principle equals a single antenna detector where a signal is correlated by its delayed version. Its performance, its sensitivity to errors in noise power estimation as well as its constant false alarm rate (CFAR) form have been analyzed previously. Herein, an alternative analysis of the CFAR form is provided as well as simple to use formulae for setting the detection threshold and evaluating detection performance. The simulation results verify that the provided analytical results are more accurate than the previous results. Furthermore, it is shown that multipath propagation may increase the detection performance due to multipath diversity if the multipaths are separable.