Sparse Phased Array Antenna Architectures for 3D-SAR Applications

We discuss sparse phased array antenna architectures by the use of multiple transmit antenna positions in order to reduce the number of needed receiver channels. We also present a compact array architecture where the synthetic array antenna size is doubled without increasing the physical array size significantly. We compare sparse arrays of 10, 20, 40 and 80 receiver positions respectively (together with 16, 8, 4 and 2 transmit antenna positions) with a fully populated array of 160 receiver positions and show very similar measured results for all the array architectures.