Keynote presentation: SAR systems

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) systems are becoming increasingly important sensors in as well the military environment as in the civilian market. In this keynote presentation an overview will be given over more than 2 decades of SAR system~ and SAR application development at TNO in the Netherlands. The overview will highlight some characteristics of early large scale active phased array SAR/GMTI systems as well as small scale, lightweight systems. Furthermore developments in signal processing will be assessed since they are equally important to the operational use of these radar systems. These developments come together in a lightweight digital array SAR system that is currently under development. This light weight SAR has been designed for short range tactical UAVs, and consists of a fully digital receive array, and a very compact active transmit antenna. This paper provides details of the design of this new SAR system.