similarly various types of pin photodiode detectors may be used illustratively a single pin detector is used which requires only one signal processing channel as opposed to four the single processing channel provides better sensitivity over a four channel pin detector because sensitivity is related to detector area and the laser spot is focused on a single channel rather than diffused over a four channel quadrant that said a four channel pin detector may be used when classical four quadrant detector generated missile guidance commands are desired or necessary referring again to fig1 a more detailed explanation of the operation of a conventional sallpl missile seeker 100 is provided temporal laser pulse returns detected by the pin photodiode 101 are subsequently processed by preamplifier 102 limit sum 103 and log amplifier 104 and input to pulse discriminator 107 the pulse discriminator 107 in conjunction with the sample and hold 105 establishes a dynamic pulse detection threshold based on the amplitude of the first temporally detected pulse and generates a pulse presence signal pulse normalizer pulse indicated by u03b2 in fig1 which is input to microprocessor 106 the pulse detection threshold decays at a given constant rate over time and laser returns detected by pin photodiode detector 101 which break this decaying threshold are identified as possibly indicating detection of a man made target in this manner the last pulse to break the threshold is deemed indicative of the true target and the one to be tracked in response to the u03b2 pulse presence signal the microprocessor 106 generates a decoder gate indicated by u03b1 this decoder gate information is input to the discriminator 107 to capture laser pulses at pre set times the.