Pulse compression is a
signal processing
Signal processing is an electrical engineering subfield that focuses on analyzing, modifying and synthesizing ''signals'', such as audio signal processing, sound, image processing, images, Scalar potential, potential fields, Seismic tomograph ...
technique commonly used by
radar
Radar is a system that uses radio waves to determine the distance ('' ranging''), direction ( azimuth and elevation angles), and radial velocity of objects relative to the site. It is a radiodetermination method used to detect and track ...
,
sonar
Sonar (sound navigation and ranging or sonic navigation and ranging) is a technique that uses sound propagation (usually underwater, as in submarine navigation) to navigate, measure distances ( ranging), communicate with or detect objects o ...
and
echography to either increase the range
resolution when pulse length is constrained or increase the
signal to noise ratio when the
peak power and the
bandwidth (or equivalently range resolution) of the transmitted signal are constrained. This is achieved by
modulating the transmitted pulse and then
correlating the received signal with the transmitted pulse.
Simple pulse
Signal description
The ideal model for the simplest, and historically first type of signals a pulse
radar
Radar is a system that uses radio waves to determine the distance ('' ranging''), direction ( azimuth and elevation angles), and radial velocity of objects relative to the site. It is a radiodetermination method used to detect and track ...
or
sonar
Sonar (sound navigation and ranging or sonic navigation and ranging) is a technique that uses sound propagation (usually underwater, as in submarine navigation) to navigate, measure distances ( ranging), communicate with or detect objects o ...
can transmit is a truncated sinusoidal pulse (also called a CW --carrier wave-- pulse), of amplitude
and
carrier frequency
In telecommunications, a carrier wave, carrier signal, or just carrier, is a periodic waveform (usually sinusoidal) that conveys information through a process called ''modulation''. One or more of the wave's properties, such as amplitude or fre ...
,
, truncated by a
rectangular function of width,
. The pulse is transmitted periodically, but that is not the main topic of this article; we will consider only a single pulse,
. If we assume the pulse to start at time
, the signal can be written the following way, using the
complex notation:
:
Range resolution
Let us determine the range resolution which can be obtained with such a signal. The return signal, written
, is an attenuated and time-shifted copy of the original transmitted signal (in reality,
Doppler effect
The Doppler effect (also Doppler shift) is the change in the frequency of a wave in relation to an observer who is moving relative to the source of the wave. The ''Doppler effect'' is named after the physicist Christian Doppler, who described ...
can play a role too, but this is not important here). There is also noise in the incoming signal, both on the imaginary and the real channel. The noise is assumed to be band-limited, that is to have frequencies only in