Pulse compression sidelobe blanking for P3 polyphase coded waveform based on matched filter response characteristic

Pulse compression technique is used in many radar systems to achieve long-range detection with high range resolution. A drawback associated with the use of pulse compression is the unwanted range sidelobes which may cause spurious targets or may mask small targets nearby. The conventional approach uses window functions to reduce the effect of range sidelobes at a cost of loss in SNR and widening the main lobe width. In this paper, we investigate the P3 polyphase coded waveforms and its matched filter response characteristics. Based on the position characteristic of the main lobe and the sidelobes, a novel approach is proposed to blank out the spurious targets caused by the range sidelobe of the waveform. The approach operates on the same received signal and does not require two processing channels to set the blanking threshold. Simulation is conducted and compared to the conventional approach to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.