Research on mono-pulse forward-looking imaging airborne radar system

In radar system, by comparison of sum and difference signal for each echo received, mono-pulse technology implements accurate angle measurement. Within a two-dimension area in front of the airborne imaging radar, the detailed azimuth information can be acquired by antenna´s continuous azimuth scanning, while the high resolution range information can be realized by pulse compression. Based on mono-pulse airborne radar system, a sort of forward-looking imaging algorithm is analyzed and a system working flow is proposed in the paper. It is verified by simulation and experiment that the proposed system can realize forward-looking imaging that in other ways, both Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and Doppler Beam Sharpening (DBS) technology fail to. Besides, the imaging quality acquired is better than real beam imaging.