Experimental Performance Investigation of Digital Beamforming on Synthetic Aperture Radar

In this paper, we present the experimental results of a Digital Beam Forming (DBF) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) performance on the purpose of the High-Resolution Wide-Swath (HRWS) SAR concept. A ground-based SAR system successfully demonstrated the DBF SAR operation. The demonstrator acquired SAR raw data with very dense spatial sampling rate in order to obtain various sampling rates. We evaluate DBF performance with respect to the image quality factor with two different types of the beam former, a fixed-beam former and an adaptive beam former. The results show that an adaptive DBF algorithm offers a wide range of the selection of the pulse repetition frequency (PRF). In addition we evaluate the noise performance compared to a reference mono-static SAR system on the same condition on single target experiment.