Pulse width

The measure is typically used with electrical signals and is widely used in the fields of radar and power supplies.

Radars transmit pulses of radio frequency energy out of an antenna and then listen for their reflection off of target objects.

This leads to the basic outcome that increasing the pulse width allows the radar to detect objects at longer range but at the cost of decreasing the accuracy of that range measurement.

In modern switched-mode power supplies, the voltage of the output electrical power is controlled by rapidly switching a fixed-voltage source on and off and then smoothing the resulting stepped waveform.

This allows complex output waveforms to be constructed by rapidly changing the pulse width to produce the desired signal, a concept known as pulse-width modulation.