Practical beam broadening for space-borne SAR using phase-only pattern synthesis

This paper describes methods for broadening the beam of space-borne SAR using phase-only element weights. This type of broadening can be valuable for expand either the irradiating swath in elevation or the effectual synthesis aperture length in azimuth of space-borne SAR. Phase-only broadening is required for typical solid-state (active phased) arrays because control of the transmit amplitude suffer to either complex control or energy losing. In this paper, a new array pattern synthesis algorithm using the two-step least-squares method is proposed, this new method utilizes the randomness of the desired pattern phase to design an array pattern. The numerical simulation results are presented to illustrate this algorithm.