A NOVEL FREQUENCY MODULATED WAVEFORM WITH A PARAMETERIZED CODING STRUCTURE

Waveform design plays a critical role in ruling the performance of a pulse compression radar system, and keeps being a hotpot for several decades. Unfortunately, some coded waveforms being widely employed in recent years nearly have their limitations. The idealistic phase code waveform has a high spectral sidelobe brought by the instantaneous phase change. The polyphase-coded FM (PCFM) waveform can provide a continuous phase function, but the frequency template error (FTE) metric is indispensable for it to control the spectrum, thereby inducing high design complexity. The nonlinear frequency modulated (NLFM) waveform has a controlled spectral content, while its coding structure is non-parameterized. To this end, we develop a novel parameterized frequency modulated (PFM) waveform and a constant envelope. Simulation and real experimental results verify the superior performance of the proposed waveform in term of autocorrelation sidelobes and energy ratio within bandwidth compared to the phase code and PCFM waveforms.