Distributed UAV-SAR: System Concept Overview and Error Model

Technological advances have opened up the possibility to combine small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and radar sensors. In this paper, a novel, multistatic system concept is presented that incorporates several identical, fully digital, multichannel radar sensors carried by UAV platforms. Each single radar is implemented in a direct sampling architecture on an AMD Zynq Ultrascale+ RF System on Chip (RFSoC), and all processing steps are performed in the digital domain, offering a high level of flexibility to the system. The system is currently being build up and intended primarily to serve as a research and development platform for the exploration of new multistatic synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging modes and techniques such as single-pass tomography, multi-baseline interferometry and holography, as well as new acquisition modes and techniques for future NewSpace SAR missions. Due to the individual local oscillators in each radar unit, accurate time, frequency and phase synchronisation is crucial for achieving a good multistatic measurement and imaging performance. An error model as well as the results of first ground-based experiments will be presented for mono- and multistatic measurements with the digital radars.