Verifcation of a SAR processor by arbitrary generation of simulated beat signal

The paper describes the idea of verification of a Linear Frequency Modulation - Continuous Waveform (LFM-CW) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) processing system operating in real-time by arbitrary generation of the beat signal. The system under the test collects the beat signal from the arbitrary waveform generator, instead from the radio frequency (RF) frontend, and produces the image. Beat waveforms are prepared previously in a SAR simulator and may correspond to a variety of mission scenarios - from single scatterers and linear platform movement to complex urban scenes and perturbed trajectories of the radar carrier. With such approach the digital and software part of the SAR processor can be examined very simply and efficiently at system level.