Digital Beam-Forming reconfigurable Radar System demonstrator

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) based on the Digital Beam-Forming (DBF) concept belongs to the family of Multi-Modal Radar Systems (MMRS) offering higher operational flexibility and improved performance compared to conventional radar systems using analog beam steering. DBF SAR, in particular, overcomes the fundamental limitation of classical SAR systems and can deliver high resolution and simultaneously wide swath images. The purpose of this paper is to present a laboratory prototype of such a MMRS architecture - a reconfigurable radar demonstrator based on the DBF architecture. A hardware configuration of the radar as well as advanced concepts to be experimentally verified using it are considered and discussed.