Transmission code optimization method for incoherent scatter radar

Abstract. When statistical inversion of a lag profile is used to determine an incoherent scatter target, the posterior variance of the estimated target can be used to determine how well a set of transmission codes perform. In this work we present an incoherent scatter radar transmission code optimization search method suitable for different modulation types, including binary phase, polyphase and amplitude modulation. We found that the combination of amplitude and phase modulation provides better performance than traditional binary phase coding, in some cases giving better accuracy than alternating codes.