Theory of incoherent‐scatter measurements using compressed pulses

The use of compressed pulses, in particular binary phase‐coded pulses, in incoherent‐scatter observations is investigated quantitatively. Since pulse compression requires coherent integration, the compression will be degraded by the time variations in the scattering medium. The degradation is small and easily corrected for as long as the total duration of the pulse (before compression) is less than Tx, the time delay at which the autocorrelation function of the scattering process first becomes negative. For longer pulses the distortions become more serious. With compressed pulses it is a relatively simple matter to achieve a range resolution of less than 1 km in incoherent‐scatter measurements.