Arc-Scanning Synthetic Aperture Radar for Accurate Location of Targets

The purpose of this article is to present the advantages that the use of arc-scanning synthetic aperture radar (Arc-SAR) would provide for accurate location of target to the weapon systems. Arc-SAR systems have an extraordinary capacity of angular discrimination of the targets, this fact make possible they can be used for the precise location of targets by replacing the large antennas required by the monopulse systems, used in this kind of applications, with a small rotating antenna. However, to carry out the real-time location of targets with the current processors a much more complex signal processing is needed. A simulator has been developed in this work, which allows the comparison of the theoretical and experimental results obtained by the classical systems against those obtained with the proposed Arc-SAR system working in the millimeter frequency bands. The results obtained demonstrate the ability of the proposed technique to accurately locate targets. This confirms that the obtained precisions allow the use the presented system in some important applications as Sense & Avoid (S&A) and weapon-pointing systems. Finally, possible applications of these techniques are described, especially useful is onboard sensors, because of the small size and weight of the antenna needed to implement an Arc-SAR system.