Vexcel corporations´ SAR processing ground station: An overview

Present an overview of a portable ground station technology for SAR processing. This system provides complete SAR processing capabilities for multiple satellites in four modules: ingest processing, SAR processing, interferometric processing and orthoSAR processing. Data is first ingested via the P-DIF/120 interface. The P-DIF/120 is a highly programmable digital interface designed with run-time programmable logic. The P-DIF/120 hardware is configured at run-time to provide a specialized decoder for the specific data to be captured. Currently ERS-1,2, JERS-1 and RADARSAT are supported, but the highly programmable aspects of the P-DIF/120 make the addition of new formats an easy chore. This module provides frame synchronization, PRN decoding and user programmable data extraction. The raw data ingested by the PDIF/120 is then passed to the SAR processing subsystem which generates single look complex data and multilook images. The interferometric subsystem can take suitable single look complex data pairs and produce interferometrically derived elevation models. The orthoSAR module is also provided to geocode and orthorectify SAR results. All the subsystems are controlled from a user-friendly graphical user interface