Laboratory experiments for the evaluation of Digital Beamforming SAR features

Abstract

Digital beamforming (DBF) technique is a promising technique for future Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). In this paper, we present the preliminary experiments and investigate the crucial parameters for the optimization of the DBF SAR. The measurements were accomplished by a ground-based DBF SAR system for a single target. The demonstrator provides the raw data including the system response. SAR images were reconstructed with numerous spatial sampling distances, not only by DBF SAR processing, but also conventional mono-static SAR processing. The reconstructed images show that the minimum variation of the phase between the receive channel is crucial to obtain the theoretical improvement factor and achieve the wide area observation with fine resolution.