Azimuth Phase Center Adaptation on Transmit for High-Resolution Wide-Swath SAR Imaging

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems with multiple receive channels allow for high-resolution wide-swath imaging thus overcoming a fundamental limitation of conventional single-aperture SAR. By using multiple apertures in azimuth, additional samples are received for each transmitted pulse. This allows for a reduced pulse repetition frequency (PRF) thereby enabling a wider swath. However, a nonoptimum PRF is associated with a nonuniform sample spacing in azimuth and needs to be compensated by a multichannel reconstruction algorithm. For strong deviations from the optimum PRF, the inverse character of such an algorithm might result in a degraded performance. This can be overcome by an innovative advanced transmit antenna architecture which allows for a pulse-to-pulse shift of the phase center. Such an antenna enables the adaptive adjustment of the system´s phase center positions to the respective PRF, thereby ensuring constant performance over a clearly extended PRF range. In particular, in combination with conventional multichannel processing strategies, this technique represents the next step toward a fully active multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) SAR and has a great potential for future systems.