A low cost SAR

With a view to building a compact, manned aircraft experimental equipment, radar studies have been carried out. In order to limit the scope of the study, a maximum antenna aperture of 40 cm×15 cm was chosen with an equipment volume of approx. 30 litres. The desired maximum radar range was set at 10 km. SAR performance is not fundamentally dependent on wavelength. However, many factors needed to be considered. Some examples are: the beamwidth and gain available from the specified aperture, the difficulty of motion compensation, the availability and expense of RF components and the amount of on board signal processing required to minimise the datalink bandwidth. From all the above factors, it was decided to operate in C-band (approx. 5.7 GHz)