An Adaptive Beamforming Technique for Countering Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Jamming Threats

Abstract

In a hostile environment synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is likely to be subjected to electronic countermeasures (ECM) to prevent target detection and classification. In practice, noise jamming may not always provide an effective ECM against the SAR because of the large power output required to obscure the SAR image. A potentially more potent threat is presented by deception or repeater jamming, which can exploit the SAR processing gain and prevent target identification and classification using relatively low power output. Such jammers are likely to be light, inexpensive and readily deployable. This paper presents an adaptive beamforming (ABF) for SAR technique which can provide robust and efficient suppression of both noise and deception jamming. The paper also includes results from experiments with SAR trials data containing jamming which demonstrate the effectiveness of the technique in a system offering using two spatial channels.