Range Sidelobes Suppression in Pulse-Compression Radar using Golay Pairs: Some Basic Limitations for Complex Targets

This study deals with a specific aspect of the well-known problem of the variation of the radar cross section of complex targets with the transmitted frequency. In particular, it considers pairs of modified Golay codes and demonstrates that-even with a modest variation of the transmitted frequency-the square complementary properties of radar returns are lost when targets are complex (i.e., made up by some point scatterers). This fact causes the range sidelobes to increase very much. A partial remedial measure to this drawback may be the simultaneous transmission of both codes by an array antenna at the same frequency.