Transmitter-in-the-Loop Optimization of Physical Radar Emissions

Ongoing work is exploring the optimization of physical radar emissions based on the continuous phase modulation (CPM) implementation of polyphase codes. Here a modification to the code search strategy known as Marginal Fisher's Information (MFI) is presented that enables this greedy approach to further improve upon the performance of the resulting CPM-implemented continuous waveform in terms of range sidelobes. The optimization process is also expanded to include the effects of the transmitter (from both modeled and physical hardware perspectives) to facilitate the optimization of physical emissions that are specifically tuned to the transmitter. This approach is particularly useful for high-power transmitters in which the actual physical emission is a spectrally modified and non-linearly distorted version of the intended radar waveform.