Emitter identification : statistics of digitally I-Q demodulated radar pulses and effects of ensemble averaging

Abstract

In electronic warfare and surveillance it is of interest to identify radar emitters based on emitted pulse shapes. Recorded pulse data have uncertainties due to emitter and receiver noise, and due to digital sampling and quantization in the receiver system. It is therefore important to quantify these effects through theory and experiment in order to construct "smart" pulse processing algorithms which minimize the uncertainties in estimated pulse shapes. This report forms a theoretical basis for the statistics of ensemble averaged (intra-pulse) radar data. Inspired by a pulse processor we have developed, we consider a signal processing system involving sampling, A/D-conversion (quantization), I-Q demodulation and ensemble averaging. As input to the system, we adopt a simple but representative radar signal model. The analysis is general and directly applicable to project 864 Profil II.