Some observation of the fluctuating radar signal

To investigate the effects of random sampling on estimates of the fluctuating radar signal parameters, high-resolution data, both in time and space, have been gathered and simulations of various integration and detection schemes performed. It is found that the output of the square-law detector is biased with respect to the true signal intensity in a similar way as the output of the logarithmic detector, although the bias magnitude is smaller. Further, the influence of random sampling on the variance and the Rayleigh bias of the fluctuating signal is explored. It is shown that the capability of the retrieval of the small-scale space variability lost in the smoothing associated with fluctuation reduction depends critically on the remaining fluctuations of the postdetected signal.