About ground-station antennas as ‘radar target’ for P-Band synthetic aperture radars in space

Active transponders and dedicated radar targets like corner reflectors are used to assist in calibration and monitoring of performances of space-based synthetic aperture radars (SAR). The radar response of large parabolic reflector antennas has been proposed for C-band radars. With the tendency towards lower frequency bands (P-Band - 435 MHz), the need for effectively large targets is present. Active transponders will likely play the important role, because passive radar targets may become very large in dimension. In this paper the use of a data downlink antenna as a repeatable target is considered, as extra `target of opportunity´ potentially to assist the performance assessment of space-based P-Band SAR-systems.