Identifying a maximally separated set of signals is important in the design
of modems. The notion of optimality is dependent on the model chosen to de
scribe noise in the measurements; while some analytic results can be derive
d under the assumption of Gaussian noise, no such techniques are known for
choosing signal sets in the non-Gaussian case. To obtain numerical solution
s for non-Gaussian detectors, minimax problems are transformed into nonline
ar programs, resulting in a novel formulation yielding problems with relati
vely few variables and many inequality constraints. Using sequential quadra
tic programming, optimal signal sets are obtained for a variety of noise di
stributions.