Preliminary study on the direct detection of phase coded signal for ranging in ladar

A structure similar to the direct detection of the DPSK signals using polarization dependent free space Mach-Zehnder interferometer is set up to validate its ability for coherent ranging. M sequence is adopted for its superior performance in code compression. The resultant signal voltage is sampled instead of being zero crossing detected and cross-correlated with the modulation signal sampled at the same rate. The ranging peak appears in the one target setup after proper calibration of the interferometric bias point but doesn’t imply any correct range information. For the two range resolved targets, the output image doesn’t depict two independent peaks. The further study is being conducted.