Signal processing techniques for phase-coded HF-VHF radars

HF-VHF radar techniques are easy to employ and commonly used in geophysical applications. They include deep radio soundings, used for probing the ionosphere, stratosphere-mesosphere measurement, weather forecast and radio-glaciology. Fast algorithms and powerful processors facilitate the development of several kinds of low power radars, but the reduction of the transmitted power has to be compensated by on-line processing of an encoded signal to maintain a favorable signal-to-noise ratio suitable for detection. Moreover, radars have to reconstruct return echoes with different travel times due to various origins (multi-path, adjacent objects, etc.). Such needs can be accomplished by means of signal phase coding and one of the most attractive is the reversal phase code. The composite echo signal must be processed to extract the physical information useful for the measurement considered. In this paper some algorithms used for on-line processing of phase-coded signals will be described, both in time and frequency domain.