A high resolution multimode synthetic aperture radar

The Canadian Department of National Defence has developed a high performance synthetic aperture mode for the AN/APS- 506 radar. Changes include improvements in the system coherency; the addition of demodulation and digitization circuitry; the placement of a strapdown inertial sensing package on the antenna; and the development of real time motion compensation and airborne SAR processing subsystems. In the early configuration of the radar, the wideband linear FM pulse compression waveforms required for SAR operation were generated using much of the existing circuitry of the AN/APS-506 synchronizer/exciter. More recently, to enhance the dynamic range and quality of the SAR images, the analog technique employed to generate the reference waveforms was replaced with a digital method