Systems and methods for wireless network discovery and synchronization using spatial whiteners, matched filters, and adaptive beamformers to identify reference signal waveforms

An antenna-array based receiver comprising:

• a plurality of antennas, each antenna of the plurality of antennas configured to receive radio frequency (RF) signals arriving from different signal sources;
• downconverters and digitizers connected to the plurality of antennas and configured to generate a set of digitized baseband data streams spanning a same frequency band, wherein the digitized baseband data streams include representations of the RF signals from the different signal sources;
• a spatial whitener configured to reduce a variation of received power across the representations of the RF signals from the different signal sources to provide a plurality of whitened data streams;
• a spatial matched filter (SW) having an impulse response configured for detection of a reference signal waveform;
• the SMF configured to receive the plurality of whitened data streams, and generate a plurality of filtered data streams containing indicators of a presence of the reference signal waveform in the plurality of whitened data streams, and, utilizing the filtered data streams, generate an SMF output waveform;
• and
• a synchronous video integrated (SVI) output amplifier configured to sum or average the SMF output waveform to generate an SVI output waveform over multiple time-synchronous snapshots of the SMF output waveform.