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
''Peak power'' refers to the maximum of the instantaneous power waveform, which, for a sine wave, is always twice the average power. For other waveforms, the relationship between peak power and average power is the peak-to-average power ratio (PAP ...
and the
bandwidth
Bandwidth commonly refers to:
* Bandwidth (signal processing) or ''analog bandwidth'', ''frequency bandwidth'', or ''radio bandwidth'', a measure of the width of a frequency range
* Bandwidth (computing), the rate of data transfer, bit rate or thr ...
(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
The rectangular function (also known as the rectangle function, rect function, Pi function, Heaviside Pi function, gate function, unit pulse, or the normalized boxcar function) is defined as
\operatorname\left(\frac\right) = \Pi\left(\frac\ri ...
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