Investigation into the Weight Update Rate for Scan-On-Receive Beamforming

Abstract

Scan-On-Receive (SCORE) is a promising digital beamforming technique to improve the performance of SAR systems and enable high-resolution wide-swath concepts with multiple elevation beams. The technique is based on a beamsteering law which follows the angle-of-arrival of a pulse’s echo traversing the ground. In practice, SCORE, also known as SweepSAR, is implemented on-board using digital processing, which implies discretized beam forming coefficients. This paper analyzes the implications of a beam switch to examine criteria for setting the necessary beam granularity and proposes a simple yet effective method to achieve pattern phase continuity.