This chapter describes a new class of continuous waveforms for noise radar that can be processed using earlier developed methods for reducing pulse compression sidelobes and equalizing compressed pulses before Doppler filtering. The purpose is to find non-repeating waveforms that are amenable to the proposed processing methods with sufficiently low processing loss. The proposed waveforms are based on codes that modulate sub-pulses which define the bandwidth of the waveform. For constant amplitude waveforms the codes are phase codes and the sub-pulses can consist of rectangular pulses with constant phase or linear phase. The proposed waveforms use many short codes to produce a code with a length that is the product of the shorter code lengths. The resulting long code can be arbitrarily long by introducing new shorter codes iteratively. The code construction is equivalent to many Kronecker products of the shorter code vectors. The codes can be random or deterministic to get a quasi-periodic yet unpredictable waveform.

Inspec keywords: pulse compression; radar signal processing; phase coding

Other keywords: linear phase; continuous coded waveforms; constant phase; noise radar; quasiperiodic waveform; phase codes; code construction; Kronecker products; rectangular pulses; constant amplitude waveforms; Doppler filtering; pulse compression sidelobe reduction; compressed pulse equalization; nonrepeating waveforms; subpulse modulation; code vectors

Subjects: Codes; Signal processing and detection; Radar equipment, systems and applications