Active antenna technologies for SAR based on Digital Beam-forming

(Convened Session) Digital Beam Forming (DBF) is a key technology for future space-borne SAR systems. It allows e.g. for realization of imaging products with high resolution and significantly higher swath widths, when compared to SAR system based on classical phased array technology. Such technique is called High Resolution Wide Swath (HRWS) and allows for increase of mission efficiency in terms of coverage/resolution by factors (e.g. 5-8). This paper gives an overview of hardware developments at Airbus in Friedrichshafen aiming at future DBF based SAR systems in C- and X-band.