Airborne Ka-band digital beamforming SAR system and flight test

Abstract

In this paper, a Ka-band digital beamforming (DBF) SAR demonstrator system is introduced which successfully demonstrated in 2016. The system has two modes, strip mode and GMTI mode. In GMTI mode, the receiving antenna of the demonstrator is divided into 24 channels. 8 channels in range are used to realize DBF-SCORE technique which can improve the signal to noise ratio of the system, and 3 channels in azimuth are used to realize GMTI. The system design and the architecture of the system are described. Finally, the flight test results are presented, and some real data processing results are given.