Publications

Fine resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) systems necessarily require wide bandwidths that often overlap spectrum utilized by other wireless services. These other emitters pose a source of Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) to the SAR echo signals that degrades SAR image quality. Filtering, or excising, the offending spectral contaminants will mitigate the interference, but at a cost of often degrading the SAR image in other ways, notably by raising offensive sidelobe levels. This report proposes borrowing an idea from nonlinear sidelobe apodization techniques to suppress interference without the attendant increase in sidelobe levels. The simple post-processing technique is termed Apodized RFI Filtering (ARF).

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It is well known that the spectrum of a signal can be calculated with a Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT), where best resolution is achieved by processing the entire data set. However, in some situations it is advantageous to use a staged approach, where data is first processed within subapertures, and the results are then combined and further processed to a final result. An artifact of this approach is the creation of grating lobes in the final response. The nature of the grating lobes, including their amplitude and spacing, is an artifact of window taper functions, subaperture offsets, and subaperture processing parameters. We assess these factors and exemplify their effects.

The "location" of the radar is the reference location to which the radar measures range. This is typically the antenna's "phase center". However, the antenna's phase center is not generally obvious, and may not correspond to any seemingly obvious physical location, such as the focal point of a dish reflector. This report calculates the phase center of an offset-fed dish reflector antenna.

The performance of an Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR) system depends on a variety of factors, many which are interdependent in some manner. In this report we specifically examine ISAR as applied to maritime targets (e.g. ships). It is often difficult to get your arms around the problem of ascertaining achievable performance limits, and yet those limits exist and are dictated by physics. This report identifies and explores those limits, and how they depend on hardware system parameters and environmental conditions. Ultimately, this leads to a characterization of parameters that offer optimum performance for the overall ISAR system. While the information herein is not new to the literature, its collection into a single report hopes to offer some value in reducing the seek time.

Backprojection has long been applied to SAR image formation. It has equal utility in forming the range-velocity maps for Ground Moving Target Indicator (GMTI) radar processing. In particular, it overcomes the problem of targets migrating through range resolution cells.

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The earth's atmosphere affects the velocity of propagation of microwave signals. This imparts a range error to radar range measurements that assume the typical simplistic model for propagation velocity. This range error is a function of atmospheric constituents, such as water vapor, as well as the geometry of the radar data collection, notably altitude and range. Models are presented for calculating atmospheric effects on radar range measurements, and compared against more elaborate atmospheric models.

Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has been used for a variety of dual-use research applications since the 1940's. By measuring the direction of the electric field vector from radar echoes, polarimetry may enhance an analyst's understanding of scattering effects for both earth monitoring and tactical surveillance missions. Polarimetry may provide insight into surface types, materials, or orientations for natural and man-made targets. Polarimetric measurements may also be used to enhance the contrast between scattering surfaces such as man-made objects and their surroundings. This report represents an initial assessment of the utility of, and applications for, polarimetric SAR at Ku-band for airborne or unmanned aerial systems.

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The earth isn't flat, and radar beams don't travel straight. This becomes more noticeable as range increases, particularly at shallow depression/grazing angles. This report explores models for characterizing this behavior.

The Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) of a radar echo signal will vary across a range swath, due to spherical wavefront spreading, atmospheric attenuation, and antenna beam illumination. The antenna beam illumination will depend on antenna pointing. Calculations of geometry are complicated by the curved earth, and atmospheric refraction. This report investigates optimizing antenna pointing to maximize the minimum SNR across the range swath.

Proper waveform parameter selection allows collecting Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) phase history data on a rotated grid in the Fourier Space of the scene being imaged. Subsequent image formation preserves the rotated geometry to allow SAR images to be formed at arbitrary rotation angles without the use of computationally expensive interpolation or resampling operations. This should be useful where control of image orientation is desired such as generating squinted stripmaps and VideoSAR applications, among others.

In high-power microwave power amplifiers for radar, distortion in both amplitude and phase should generally be expected. Phase distortions can be readily equalized. Some amplitude distortions are more problematic than others. In general, especially for SAR using LFM chirps, low frequency modulations such as gain slopes can be tolerated much better than multiple cycles of ripple across the passband of the waveform.

A horn-fed dish reflector antenna has characteristics including beam pattern that are a function of its mechanical form. The beam pattern can be altered by changing the mechanical configuration of the antenna. One way to do this is with a reflecting insert or shim added to the face of the original dish.

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The purpose of this report is to provide a background to Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image formation using the Polar Format (PFA) processing algorithm. This is meant to be an aid to those tasked to implement real-time image formation using the Polar Format processing algorithm.

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