A stepped chirp technique for range resolution enhancement

A novel stepped frequency chirp waveform concept for increasing the range resolution of an existing pulse compression radar is presented. The stepped frequency chirp technique is ideally suited to obtaining high range resolution in a radar system that has a limited instantaneous bandwidth, but a large tunable bandwidth. To achieve high range resolution using these given bandwidths, two or more chirp waveforms are sequentially transmitted and received at selected carrier frequencies in the tunable bandwidth, and attached together using signal processing techniques to simulate a chirp signal covering up to the entire tunable bandwidth. In contrast to conventional or hybrid stepped frequency methods, the technique achieves both unambiguous range coverage and good range sidelobes without requiring a large number of frequency steps.<>