UHF wideband SAR design and preliminary results

The Environmental Research Institute of Michigan (ERIM) is currently building a wideband UHF upgrade to the NAWC/ERIM P-3 SAR. This system will be wide-bandwidth (user selectable bandwidth of up to 580 MHz within the band of 200-900 MHz) and it is fully-polarimetric. It will operate on a Navy P-3 Aircraft at slant ranges ranging from 6-17 km and a nominal resolution of approximately 0.33 m in range and 0.66 m in cross-range. The system was primarily designed to penetrate foliage or other obscuring media to detect/classify cultural objects; however, the system is expected to be useful for a variety of remote sensing applications. Potential applications include tree trunk counting, tree classification, determining flooded forest area, geology, and finding shallow buried objects. The operating parameters and capabilities of the radar are presented. The hardware design approach is described. During the design, a rail-based synthetic aperture radar (SAR) was used to image a variety of obscured targets. This SAR images targets in their natural backgrounds with performance comparable to the UHF upgrade SAR (over a very small area) and demonstrates the potential of the new sensor. Example imagery of a truck and airplane wreckage within a deciduous forest as well as images of buried barrels will be presented which demonstrate the potential of the UHF upgrade to the NAWC/ERIM P-3 SAR