An Airborne Low-Cost SAR for Remote Sensing: Hardware Design and Development

Authors

Ram Narayanan, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Paul C. Cantu, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Xiaojian Xu, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Date of this Version

2002

Comments

Published in 2002 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 2002. IGARSS '02. Volume 5, pp. 2669–2671; doi: 10.1109/IGARSS.2002.1026736 Copyright 2002 IEEE. Used by permission.

Abstract

An airborne low-cost synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is under development at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The SAR system is an X-band, stepped-chirp frequency modulation (SCFM) radar system. One of its unique features is that the waveform generation consists of a timing-controlled D/A converter and VCO arrangement to synthesize the SCFM signal, whereby allowing for less design complexity and a much lower overall system cost. In this paper, we present a brief description of the system and some computer simulation results.