BISTATIC FMCW SAR RAW SIGNAL SIMULATOR FOR EXTENDED SCENES

By mounting the transmitter and receiver of Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) system on separate platforms, bistatic FMCW SAR offers more considerable capabilities, reliability and flexibility while maintaining the small size, low cost and agile reaction. The bistatic FMCW SAR raw signal simulator is highly required to quantitatively support the design of bistatic FMCW SAR, to help mission planning, test processing algorithms, and analyze jamming and noises. Bistatic FMCW SAR raw signal can be exactly simulated target-by-target in time domain but with extremely time and memory consuming, especially when extended scenes are considered. In this paper, bistatic FMCW SAR signal model and Bistatic Point Target Reference Spectrum (BPTRS) is proposed, based on which a raw signal simulator is developed in the 2-D frequency domain for the first time, where Chirp-Z Transform (CZT) is used to formulate the range migration terms. By taking advantage of Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), the proposed raw signal simulator highly reduces the computational load with respect to the time domain approach. The simulated raw data is verified by analyzing the corresponding images focused by Range Doppler Algorithm (RDA).