Multichannel SAR With Reflector Antenna for High-Resolution Wide-Swath Imaging

To overcome the inherent limitation between high azimuth resolution and wide swath in the conventional one-channel synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system, a large receiving planner antenna, which is split into multiple subapertures in both azimuth and elevation, is usually adopted. However, such a system has high system implementation complexity and requires azimuth signal reconstruction under nonuniform sampling condition. To reduce the complexity of the SAR system and processing algorithm, a reflector antenna is adopted in the spaceborne multichannel SAR system presented in this letter for high-resolution wide-swath (HRWS) imaging. According to the special characteristics of reflector antenna, a modified single-phase-center (SPC) technique is presented. The system configuration and imaging scheme are described in detail. A typical spaceborne SAR example with a reflector antenna for HRWS imaging is designed, and its performances are analyzed. Simulation results denote that the presented SAR system shows satisfactory performances with lower data rate, system load, and implementation complexity.