Combination of linear and circular SAR for 3-D features

An economic and fast change of an existing radar system with a linear synthetic aperture into a system with 3D capabilities is presented. For actual and future fields of radar in remote sensing, such as high precision mine detection, highly accurate vegetation measurements and interferometric SAR applications the importance of resolution in the third dimension is growing fast. Until now a such a radar required an expensive phased array antenna, a costly narrow-beam scanning system, or a combination of both of them. In order to overcome these problems, the combination of an existing linear SAR outdoor system (LISA) with a circular aperture for vertical resolution led to a fast and economic additional 3rd dimension feature. A test experiment has been performed to validate the system and the implemented SAR processor. The very promising results are presented