A Dual-Gain Design for the Geostationary Synthetic Thinned Array Radiometer

A new geometry for synthetic aperture radiometers is presented which increases the distance between adjacent elements in the array without changing the visibility sample density in the u-v plane. This provides room for higher elemental antenna gain, which improves both the overall system sensitivity and alias rejection in the synthesized image-both critical requirements for the Earth observing application. The geometry is derived from the simple Y -array geometry by shifting alternate elements within an otherwise linear array arm into two or more rows of antennas. The resulting system largely retains the same hexagonal sample grid in the u-v plane of the visibility function, yet allows for an elemental antenna aperture that is physically larger than the u-v sample spacing. Only the shortest visibility baselines are lost, and a small dedicated low-gain array must be added to the system to recover these baselines. The radiometer is thus divided between a large high-gain array and a small low-gain array. Since the sensitivity (delta-T) of the system is dominated by that of the large array, this approach greatly improves the overall system sensitivity-in this letter, by a factor of 9 (or, equivalently, factor 81 integration time).