Ultrasonic non-Destructive evaluation (NDE) techniques are widely used to ensure the integrity and strength of structures. Guided ultrasonic waves are typically used for inspecting inaccessible and hidden locations of complex structures. For rapid inspection, non-contact transduction methods such as air-coupled ultrasonic transducers and electromagnetic acoustic transducers (EMAT) are preferred. However, the major downside of these techniques is the high-power requirement. To overcome this challenge, a pulse compression-based signal processing technique called coded excitation is proposed. By using temporally long low-power transmission signals, results comparable in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to high-power transmissions are achieved. The pulse compression-based coded excitation technique for low-power operation and enhanced SNR results for guided ultrasonic wave NDE is presented. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.