Millimetric SAR motion compensation

Discusses the motion compensation aspects of sideways-looking millimetric radar for airborne short-range ground surveillance. The platform is assumed to be an unmanned aircraft, which will operate at various heights up to a ceiling of 2 km. Within an unmanned aircraft, the space available for the radar components is limited. In particular, the size of the antenna cannot be large. However, although narrow real-aperture beamwidths may be obtained at millimetric wavelengths with an antenna of practical dimensions, an order of magnitude of further reduction in effective beamwidth is necessary in order to achieve the required degree of azimuth resolution. This leads to the use of synthetic aperture processing techniques, in which the synthetic aperture is approximately one order of magnitude greater than the antenna dimension