The airborne VHF SAR system CARABAS

FOA has designed, built and tested a new airborne synthetic aperture radar system, CARABAS, which operates in the lower part of the VHF-band. This frequency region gives the system a good ability to penetrate vegetation and also to some extent ground. Furthermore, the resolution cell and the smallest scatterers influenced by the frequencies are comparable in size and a reduced speckle level in the final SAR image is obtained. Critical parts in the development have been the antenna, the receiver and the signal processing algorithms. A number of test flights have been carried out during 1992. The first major SAR campaign was conducted in October 1992 at two different test sites and included deployment of different reference targets in parallel with a ground truth programme