In this paper, newly-found properties of the pseudo-ternary maximum-length shift register sequences (pseudo-ternary M-sequences) are described. In particular, the balance properties, the run-length distribution, the cross-correlation properties, and the decimation relationships are shown. The pseudo-ternary M-sequence is obtained by subtracting the one-chip shifted version from the {+1,-1}-valued M-sequence. Moreover, in this paper, performances of the direct sequence spread spectrum (DS/SS) system using the pseudo-ternary M-sequence are analyzed. In the performance evaluation, tracking error performance (jitter) and bit error rate (BER) performance that takes the jitter into account in DS/SS system with a pseudo-ternary M-sequence non-coherent DLL are evaluated. Using the pseudo-ternary M-sequence instead of the conventional M-sequences can improve the tracking error performance about 2.8 [dB]. Moreover, BER of the DS/SS system using the pseudo-ternary M-sequence is superior about 0.8 [dB] to that using the {+1,-1}-valued M-sequence.