Phase Estimation for an Experimental Noise Radar

In previous work, estimators were derived for various parameters characterizing the signals of a noise radar. One of these parameters was the phase shift that accrued in noise radar signals as they traveled through free space. Although the theory of these estimators, including their probability distributions, are well developed, they have not yet been experimentally verified. In this work, we built a laboratory-based noise radar and used it to show that experimentally-obtained probability distributions for the phase estimator match the theoretical probability distributions almost perfectly. The theory was tested at different transmit powers and different integration lengths, and are shown to agree closely with theoretical expectations in all cases. This constitutes strong experimental evidence for the theoretical results that we obtained previously.