Abstract: The study of radar target transfer function (TTF) is relevant to both automatic target recognition using range profiling methods and the optimisation of detection performance by exploiting matched waveform techniques. However, range profiles, and their associated TTFs, are known to be highly sensitive to target geometry and aspect angle. This paper demonstrates that TTFs and their associated range profiles both decorrelate within 1° variation in aspect angle and that such rapid decorrelation is dominated by scintillation effects rather than the migration through range cell phenomenon. However, TTFs may offer advantages over range profiling since the former are typically characterised by many more data points than the latter. This leads to increased separability of different target classes and generally lower correlation statistics when using TTFs. TTFs are also important in the design of matched radar waveforms. A combination of experimental results using scaled model targets and simulation is presented which demonstrate that under ideal conditions matched waveforms can improve the signal to clutter ratio by up to 30 dB.