Abstract: Bistatic MIMO radar combines the advantages of the MIMO radar and bistatic radar, and has unique advantages compared to traditional radar, but there is also a problems of high processing complexity and output losses of matching filter in search stage of signal processing. This paper constructs the bistatic MIMO radar system model. And then the “Range –Direction” coupling effect of SFDLFM(stepped frequency-division linear frequency modulation) signal is analyzed, under the effect of which the SFDLFM signal almost loses the spatial resolution ability to the transmit angle of target. Based on the characteristic above, a simplified search structure of bistatic MIMO radar is proposed, which can effectively reduce the search processing complexity of bistatic MIMO radar. After that, a way of distance segment dividing based on the “Range –Direction” coupling effect is proposed. The principle of this division way is to limit the transmit array spatial frequency deviation in certain range, which can effectively reduce the matched filter output loss, and finally simulation results are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.