Single Channel Degarbling of SIF/IFF Pulses Using Spectral Inverse Filtering

The secondary surveillance radar (SSR) is a transponder system used in air traffic control (ATC). Due to growing traffic densities, it is increasingly likely that a ground station receives a mixture of responses from various aircraft, partially overlapping in frequency and time. Currently such “collisions “ are disregarded, at a loss of system performance and reliability. This overlapping can be reduced by processing using antenna array [1], [2], [3] or with using only single channel via frequency superresolution with using of transponder carrier frequency inaccuracies [4]. In this paper the possibility of single channel receiver overlapped pulse separation is presented. The main principle is using of spectral inverse filter for increasing range accuracy [5]. Because the spectral inverse filter for SSR transponder pulses are highly mismatched the presented principle is usable only in reduced range where is appropriate signal to noise ratio (SNR).