TABLE OF CONTENTS This chapter discusses the performance of a digital receiver and the procedures of testing it. The receiver performance is one of the most important aspects in receiver research. One of the main impasses in receiver research is that there are no universally acceptable standards in the performance of electronic warfare (EW) receivers. Because of this shortcoming, researchers do not know where to improve the EW receiver performance. If one claims to have made some improvements in receiver performance, but cannot report the result quantitatively, it will be rather difficult to be accepted. Worse yet, people can make claims on certain performances of an EW receiver that cannot even be used in a system at all. For example, if a receiver misses many signals or produces a large number of spurious responses, in general it cannot be used in any system. Under this condition, no matter how good other performances are, the result should not be reported. There should be some minimum requirements a receiver must be measured against in order to qualify as a functioning receiver.
One interesting experience is in channelized receivers. The main research needed is in the parameter encoder to encode the channel outputs into frequency words. However, since there is no performance standard for the parameter encoder, very few people have worked in this area. Even if one obtains some results, they cannot be published because one may not be able to claim any improvement. On the other hand, the filter bank itself has...
