An airborne low-cost SAR for remote sensing: hardware design and development

An airborne low-cost synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is under development at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The SAR system is an X-band, stepped-chirp frequency modulation (SCFM) radar system. One of its unique features is that the waveform generation consists of a timing-controlled D/A converter and VCO arrangement to synthesize the SCFM signal, whereby allowing for less design complexity and a much lower overall system cost. In this paper, we present a brief description of the system and some computer simulation results.