Pulse compression with ultra-low range sidelobe for spaceborne meteorology radars

There is a very strict requirement for the range sidelobe, when spaceborne radar with pulse compression is used for detecting of meteorological phenomena such as precipitations. A novel technique for compressing pulse and suppressing range sidelobe is proposed: a spread chirp signal with wider bandwidth and longer duration is transmitted by the radar transmitter; the received signal and the transmitted signal are respectively truncated with their duration and bandwidth and weighted on their amplitude in frequency domain; pulse compression is accomplished through correlation processing. By the presented the techniques, the achieved peak range sidelobe level can be less then −110 dB. With this new technique, it is avoided that the high power amplifier can only operate in nonsaturated status which leads to the degradation of efficiency when compressing chirp signal, and the achieved range sidelobe is not sensitive to Doppler shifts.