Calibration of synthetic aperture radiometers in space: antenna effects

The measurement of mutual coupling is being investigated as a technique to aid in the calibration of synthetic aperture microwave radiometers. The technique is based on recent research suggesting that the antenna patterns that are needed for calibration can be reconstructed from a measurement of the mutual coupling between elements in the thinned array. A synthetic aperture radiometer is particularly suited to the measurement of mutual coupling because the basic hardware (a correlation interferometer) measures the product for each antenna pair in the array. This paper describes research to evaluate the role of mutual coupling on the antenna patterns and describes a technique to adapt the mutual coupling measurement for calibration of radiometers deployed for remote sensing from space