Effects of Velocity on Radar Waveforms
A common assumption in pulse-Doppler radar is that when interrogating a point, or point-like target, the received echo waveform is an attenuated and time-delayed, but otherwise faithful facsimile of the transmitted waveform. The effects of a relative line-of-sight velocity between radar and target is often presumed to manifest only as a pulse-to-pulse time delay, usually simplified as a phase shift. However, a significant line-of-sight velocity will also in fact substantially perturb the received waveform even for a single pulse, and may need to be accounted for, and compensated during radar signal processing.