On the practical aspects of the reference channel detector in frequency-hopping receivers

Threshold setting methods for serial search acquisition of frequency hopping waveforms are considered. The reference channel detector (Stojanovic and Jovanovic, 1991), which shows considerable immunity to charges in signal dynamics and pulse jamming, is analyzed with respect to hardware complexity. Various configurations are discussed, and their performance is evaluated. A modified search strategy which reduces the mean acquisition time is proposed. For slow frequency hopping, it is shown that a widely used procedure in tactical radios, where a binary demodulator is followed by a correlator, is the direct approximation of the reference channel detector.