Low cost measurement setup for passive microwave remote sensing by aperture synthesis technique

Synthetic aperture technique has the potential to meet the spatial resolution requirement of passive microwave remote sensing. In order to verify the theory of aperture synthesis at low expense, it is desirable to use only two receivers channel and one digital correlator and to measure all the baselines successively. Considering this, a one-dimensional prototype of aperture synthesis system at Ku band is introduced in this paper. It contains two antenna elements, two receiving channels, two ADCs, and an image reconstruction part. All required baselines are acquired by moving the antenna pair sequentially; and corresponding samples of the visibility function are measured. The experiment and simulations results are compared and show the imager can give good one-dimensional images of a point source target.