Experimental study of a polarity receiver applied to the detection of pseudorandom sequences buried in noise

The aim of this paper is the experimental study of the one bit correlator (OBC) receivers to detect pseudorandom sequences (PRS) buried in a bandlimited additive Gaussian white noise. The one bit correlator receiver is known as a polarity receiver. Analytical expressions of the output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the OBC receiver have been derived recently. These expressions is verified experimentally when the desired received signal and the local reference signal are PRS. It is shown that the output SNR depends on the input SNR and that fluctuations of the output signal play a major role for the detection of the desired signal. In order to reduce these fluctuations, a modified OBC receiver, which consists of averaging M acquisitions, is used. The probability of detection and the probability of false alarm are given. In all cases a good agreement is obtained between analytical and experimental results.