Pulse compression system

This patent describes a system for polyphase encoding transmitted pulses of energy and for decoding the received signals to enhance returns from the range interval being examined during a particular processing period and attenuate returns from contiguous range intervals (pulse compression). The system includes a decoding device which comprises a delay circuit having N distributed outputs including its input for producing a uniform delay between adjacent outputs corresponding to N inputted elements of received phase-coded signal of length N squared; a conjugator circuit coupled to the first N/2 successive outputs of the delay circuit; a first signal-combining circuit coupled to the conjugator circuit and to the last N/2 successive outputs of the delay circuit; a multiplier circuit coupled to the first signal-combining circuit; and a second signal-combining circuit coupled to the multiplier circuit. The decoding device provides a decoding phase shift to the signal elements of the phase-coded signal.