Advanced Multi-Channel SAR Imaging – Measured Data Demonstration

Multi-channel synthetic aperture radar (SAR) allows for high-resolution wide-swath imagery thus overcoming the inherent limitation of conventional SAR. To cope with a non-uniformly sampled data array in azimuth caused by variations of the pulse repetition frequency (PRF), such systems require appropriate coherent processing as e.g. the multi-channel reconstruction algorithm. This paper presents the applicability of this algorithm to airborne measured multi-channel X-band data. In this context, impact and performance of different channel balancing methods are investigated. Furthermore, the analytic prediction of residual azimuth ambiguities is verified by the measured data by means of a point target analysis.