A Coherent Reception Method for ESM Receivers Based on Cross-Correlation

In order to improve the sensitivity of wideband Electronic Support Measures (ESM) receivers, a coherent reception method based on cross-correlation of the received signal with a local sample data called “Template” is proposed in this paper. Theoretical derivation reveals that the effect of the method on sensitivity enhancement is mainly related to the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of received signal and sample data, and correlation point. Simulation results shows that SNR can be increased to more than 15dB in time-domain before encoding by providing high SNR sample data or increase correlation points, when the received signal SNR is -10dB. At the same time, an efficient coherent reception method combined with frequency-domain channelization has been presented, which is suitable for digital receivers to be adapted to complex electromagnetic environment. Besides, the amount of field programmable gate array (FPGA) logic resources can be significantly reduced.