Solving the Range-Doppler Dilemma with the SMPRF Pulse Code, practical Results from a real Radar

New revolutionary radar measurement methods have been developed for the ionospheric research radars. These methods mainly address the situation of an overspread target with such a large spectral width that, due to the small pulse separation needed in spectral measurement, range aliasing could not be avoided unless special coding and inversion methods were available to solve the problem. For example,a typical ionospheric research radar operating at 1 GHz and utilizing these new measurement methods is able to measure simultaneously reflectivity from 70 to 1500 km range and Doppler from 0 m/s to 2500 m/s.

These methods are currently used in the IS-radars all over the world. Similar methods could have great importance in future weather radars, where one often encounters the same problem of too wide spectra or too high Dopplers to be measured with any non-aliased pulse repetition frequency. In this paper, the simplest ambiguity free radar measurement method (SMPRF, Simultaneous Multi PRF) is applied to a C-band weather radar. Workings of the patented code are explained and some practical results from the FMI Luosto radar are shown.