Suppression of range ambiguities in synthetic aperture radar systems

One of the principle limitations of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems is the restriction on resolution and coverage. In a conventional SAR simultaneous wide swath (coverage) and high cross range resolution is not possible, since the two requirements contradict each other. In practice, only a semi-optimum solution is obtained, which depends on the relation between the two performance parameters. This paper investigates possible enhancements of a conventional SAR system in order to overcome this contradiction. Special attention is paid to the analytic calculations necessary to evaluate the performance of the new methods and the feasibility of the hardware realization.