Forty years of digital SAR and slow GMTI technology

40-years of digital SAR and Slow GMTI technology is traced from the first system to demonstrate real-time digitally correlated SAR from an intentionally maneuvering platform [1] to the current lite-weight dual-channel radar (DCR) providing simultaneous SAR and GMTI data. The Dual-Channel Radar (DCR) has been developed providing lite-weight SAR GMTI capability for Small UAVs. The prototype radar weighs 5-lbs and has demonstrated the extraction of ground moving targets (GMTs) embedded in highresolution SAR imagery data. Sum and difference channel data is used in a DPCA algorithm to extract the GMTs and display them on the Sum channel high resolution SAR image. Heretofore this type of capability has been reserved for much larger systems such as the JSTARS. Previously small liteweight SARs featured only a single channel and only displayed SAR imagery. With the advent of this new capability, SAR GMTI performance is now possible for small UAV class radars for DoD and DHS applications. The DCR is the culmination of multiple Phase II and Phase II plus SBIR efforts over the past 10-years, since 2002, for the Army, DARPA and AFRL.