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Waveforms with Staggered PRFs

When to Use Staggered PRFs

Using a nonconstant PRF has important applications in radar. This approach is called PRF or PRI staggering.

Uses of staggered PRFs include

  • Removal of Doppler ambiguities, or blind speeds, where Doppler frequencies that are multiples of the PRF are aliased to zero

  • Mitigation of the effects of jamming

To implement a staggered PRF, configure your waveform object using a vector instead of a scalar for the PRF property value.

Linear FM Waveform with Staggered PRF

Open Live Script

This example shows how to model a linear FM pulse waveform with two PRFs of 1 and 2 kHz. Set the sweep bandwidth to 200 kHz and the duration of 100 μs. The sample rate is 1 MHz. Output 5 pulses.

prfs = [1e3 2e3];
waveform = phased.LinearFMWaveform('PRF',prfs,'SweepBandwidth',200e3,...
    'PulseWidth',100e-6,'NumPulses',5);
sig = waveform();
T = length(sig)*(1/waveform.SampleRate);
t = unigrid(0,1/waveform.SampleRate,T,'[)');
plot(t.*1000,real(sig))
set(gca,'xtick',[0 1 1.5 2.5 3]);
xlabel('millisec')

Figure contains an axes object. The axes object with xlabel millisec contains an object of type line.