General Electric Company

Jerald D Nespor

Harry Urkowitz

John J Gallagher

Sheldon L Katz

A radar system includes a doppler/pulse compressor/range sidelobe suppressor filter bank (40), which separates received echo signals according to their frequency spectrum into doppler channels, and within each doppler channel performs pulse compression for reducing the duration of the received signals, and also performs range sidelobe suppression, for improving range resolution. It may be advantageous to perform certain types of processing in the time domain, such as determination of spectral moments for estimating velocity spread, mean closing velocity, and reflectivity of a diffuse target such as a weather phenomenon. An inverse (frequency-to-time) transform (50) is performed on the signals produced by the doppler/pulse compressor/range sidelobe suppressor filter bank (40), to produce a reconstructed version of the received signals. In these reconstructed signals, the pulses are compressed, and range sidelobes are reduced. The time-domain processing (62) is performed on the reconstructed signals. In a particular embodiment of the invention, the range sidelobe suppression and pulse compression filters (34a, 34b . . . ) follow the doppler filters (32), but any ordering of the filters may be used. Interchannel frequency interference attributable to the non-zero bandwidth of the Doppler filters may be reduced by pulse-to-pulse time weighting (30) applied to the received signals over a time window corresponding to a particular dwell, together with inverse weighting (62) following the inverse transformation.

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Mt. Laurel, NJ, United States of America

Jerald D Nespor