Pulse compression optimization by reactance transformation: Comparative application to different signal windows

Pulse compression is a powerful tool to estimate the impulse response of a system in noisy measurement environment conditions. A direct application of this technique, however, implies the introduction of side-lobes that come together with the desired response. A reduction of these side-lobes can be obtained through appropriate windowing techniques: one of these techniques, based on the Reactance Transformation, has recently been proposed by the authors and applied to the Nyquist's Raised Cosine Window. In this paper, the Reactance Transformation technique is applied to a number of windowing techniques, among the most frequently used in non-destructive testing. The experimental results show that, when applied to band-pass signals, the technique always reduces the side-lobes closer to the main peak, improving the range resolution; this effect becomes fundamental as the percentage band increases.