Experimental verification of stepped frequency continuous wave Ground-Based SAR

GBSAR (Ground-Based Synthetic Aperture Radar) is an effective supplement to Space-borne SAR and Air-borne SAR, as well as an experimental platform for deformation detection and verification of advanced microwave imaging modes and algorithms. This paper first introduces the basic principle and structure of SFCWGBSAR (Stepped Frequency Continuous Wave GBSAR) developed by IECAS (Institute of Electronics Chinese Academy of Sciences), followed by the analysis of imaging principle and performance of SFCW (Stepped Frequency Continuous Wave). Frequency sampling of SFCW utilizes IDFT to realize range compression without match filtering, which simplifies the imaging algorithm, lowers the sampling rate of AD converter and reduces the data size in imaging. A simulation of SFCW range compression is conducted and the result is consistent with the analysis of SFCW´s imaging performance. Finally, an experiment is presented and the result verifies the imaging ability of SFCWGBSAR.