RESOLUTION OF BINARY SIGNALS FOR THRESHOLD DETECTION IN NARROWBAND NON-GAUSSIAN NOISE.

The resolution of binary signals in Middleton's class A narrowband non-Gaussian noise for both coherent and incoherent threshold or weak-signal detection is treated. A specific relative crosscorrelation coefficient rho is defined for narrowband binary signals, and it is then shown that: (i) for coherent detection, 'antipodal' ( rho equals minus 1) signals are best, i. e. they give the smallest error probability P//e in the threshold regime, and (ii) for incoherent detection, 'orthogonal' ( rho equals 0) signals are best. Threshold performance is a monotonic function of NSL, where N is the number of large (independent) data samples, S is the normalized snr and L is Fisher's information measure for the noise statistics.