RCS Determination of Reference Targets down to 0.1 dB Uncertainty

Kurzfassung

For external radiometric calibration of SAR sensors, active radar calibrators (ARCs), well known as transponders, are often employed due to their high radar cross section (RCS) compared to their size. Due to their complexity, the transponder hardware has to be calibrated itself before it can be used as a reference target, for which the so-called three transponder method was developed at DLR. This innovative technique does not require any external standard and is used in this manuscript to calibrate a single transponder with yet unreached accuracy. The calibration technique, measurement setup, and data processing as well as the uncertainty evaluation will be presented.