A novel range profiles splicing approach in stepped-frequency radars

The traditional stepped-frequency signal processing method, employing IFFT to obtain the synthetic high resolution range (HRR) profile, suffers from a limitation that the max unambiguous range extent is too short, which is determined by the frequency step size. Some range splicing algorithms have been developed to solve this problem. However, for moving targets, performances of these range splicing algorithms are degraded because of range-Doppler coupling. In this paper, a novel range splicing method is proposed specially for moving targets. It uses the maximum amplitude point to determine the location of splicing window, and uses the compare strategy to tolerate the bias of splicing window. Both theoretical analysis and simulation prove the effectiveness of the proposed method.