CHAPTER 21

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CHAPTER 21SYNTHETIC APERTURE RADARL J. CutronaSarcutron, BASIC PRINCIPLES AND EARL Y HISTORYFor airborne ground-mapping radar there has been continuous pressure and de-sire to achieve finer resolution. Initially, this finer resolution was achieved by theapplication of "brute-force" techniques. Conventional radar systems of this typewere designed to achieve range resolution by the radiation of a short pulse andazimuth resolution by the radiation of a narrow range resolution problem and some of the pulse compression techniquesare discussed in Chap. 10. There it is shown that techniques are available forachieving a resolution significantly finer than that corresponding to the pulsewidth, provided a signal of sufficient bandwidth is transmitted.

Peff = 5T^Leff-(2L2) Here peff is the effective half-power beamwidth of the synthetic aperture, and Leff is the length of the synthetic aperture. A more detailed derivation of the resolution capability of a synthetic aperture radar will be given later in this chapter.

  Synthetic