Investigation on Full-Aperture Multichannel Azimuth Data Processing in TOPS

The novel displaced phase center antenna (DPCA) azimuth multichannel technique is well suited to improve the coarser azimuth resolution of the terrain observation by progressive scans (TOPS) mode for a fixed total receive antenna length. However, both the azimuth multichannel nonuniform sampling and the aliased Doppler spectrum in TOPS raise the azimuth data processing difficulty. This letter proposes an innovative full-aperture processing approach, which adds an azimuth derotation step for each azimuth channel before azimuth multichannel data reconstruction and utilizes the prefiltering operation in the two-step focusing technique to resolve both azimuth ambiguity problems caused by the DPCA technique and azimuth beam progressive scanning. In addition to presenting the proposed azimuth preprocessing approach, the impact of the approach on the azimuth ambiguity-to-signal ratio is analyzed in detail. Simulation results validate the proposed multichannel processing approach for the TOPS mode.