Effects of vibration on coherent homodyne radars

Phase noise is one of the major problems for the radar systems, which implements coherent processing before detection. Coherency disturbance causes loss in SNR and difficulties in multi target detection. Due to the nonlinear correlation characteristics of phase noise, homodyne receivers are more sensitive to coherency problems. Although the main source of phase noise is transmitter phase noise caused by the oscillators and power amplifiers, the vibration due to the movement of the platform also causes phase noise in certain cases. Motion compensation is a well-known technique to mitigate the effects of vibration of the movement. In this paper, we study how the power spectrum of a vibration profile affects the coherency within a pulse and between the pulses. Based on the observations, we propose a method to determine the need for the use of a motion compensation algorithm in a coherent homodyne radar.