Modified PWNLFM Signal for Side-Lobe Reduction
Many applications in radar systems require low range side-lobe performance which is achieved by pulse compression processing. Most used chirp signal for this processing is linear frequency modulation (LFM) signal but with a presence of first high side-lobe level. Suppression of this side-lobe requires weighting function causing the reduction in signal to noise ratio at the receiver owing to mismatch loss. Non-linear chirp signals are introduced as a solution and became most practiced signals aimed at reducing side-lobes. In this paper, an overall piece wise non-linear frequency modulation chirp signal is designed by merging two stages, one with linear function and the other with a tangent based non-linear function. Simulation results show significant reduction in the sidelobe level of autocorrelation function when NLFM is generated in this method.