Antenna Directing Synchronization for Bistatic Synthetic Aperture Radar Systems

Bistatic synthetic aperture radar (BiSAR) operates with a separate transmitter and receiver that are mounted on separate platforms. This spatial separation provides several operational advantages like reduced vulnerability for military applications and increased radar cross section. However, efficient spatial synchronization (antenna direction synchronization), time synchronization, and phase synchronization must be ensured for BiSAR systems. A literary search reveals that BiSAR synchronization, especially spatial synchronization, is still a technical challenge, and little work has been reported. As such, the impact of antenna directing synchronization errors including range dimension and azimuth dimension are analyzed with statistical models. Simulation results show that efficient spatial synchronization compensation is required for BiSAR high-resolution imaging. Hence, an antenna directing synchronization approach with multi-antenna on receive is proposed.