Comparison of Various Instantaneous Power Methods for the Estimation of Time-Parameters of Poly Phase Coded Radar Signal

Key feature of the electronic intelligence (ELINT) setup as part of the electronic warfare is the interception and analysis of radar signals. This paper as part of ELINT provides a time parameter estimation algorithm associated with poly-phase pulsed radar signal of low probability of intercept (LPI) in a non-cooperative environment in order to identify its other characteristics. Three different methods based on power obtained at instants of time are used. The first two are obtained from the time-aspect approximation of a time-frequency distribution (TFD) while the third one is the traditional method of using its conjugate form. The main TFD used in this paper is Wigner-Ville distribution (WVD) of separable kernel and its brief heuristic approach was presented. Thereafter, an algorithm based on measuring the time-spectrum width is developed so as to determine two basic time parameter of the radar signal; either the pulse width (PW) or the pulse repetition period (PRP). The quality of the algorithm developed is tested at various signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) in the presence of noise modeled by pseudorandom numbers of Gaussian nature. The Result obtained shows that for a fixed threshold of 37.5%, power at instants of time obtained from the TFD performs best at minimum SNR of −15 dB. The traditional method of getting power at instants of time performs very well if a variable threshold is applied at minimum SNR of −11 dB. The results shows that the proposed methods may be deployed in the practical ELINT field for analysis of radar signal