Wideband Optical TTD SAR Antenna

Optical beam forming networks (OBFN) are an interesting alternative for the design of wideband antenna arrays. They are potentially more power efficient and lighter than their microwave counterparts. These two characteristics make them especially appealing in space remote sensing applications. However, in a practical implementation of OBFN in a real SAR system, different architectural and technological tradeoffs need to be assessed. Taking as an example a free-space OBFN (D. Dolfi et al., 1991) and an existing SAR mission (M. Lisi et al., 1993), this paper studies the impact of different OBFN parameters like scalability, insertion loss and crosstalk in the performance of the antenna array system