A Novel Radar Waveform Design for a Low-Power HF Monostatic Radar

In this letter, a novel radar waveform is proposed for a low-power high-frequency monostatic radar used for ionospheric sensing and aircraft detection. In this proposed waveform, a hybrid modulation scheme is adopted, where the pulse-to-pulse phase is coded by the WG sequence, and the frequency of each subpulse is linearly modulated with a fixed chirp rate. Compared with the conventional binary-phase-coded waveform, larger signal processing gain, higher range resolution, and lower range sidelobes can be simultaneously achieved with the proposed waveform. Furthermore, it is more insensitive to the Doppler shifts and is not subject to significant range-Doppler cross coupling. With this newly proposed waveform, the ionospheric backscatter ionogram with clear leading and trailing edges can be obtained in the range of 500-2300 km, and the aircraft target can be also clearly detected.