One-Bit Quantization for Synthetic Aperture Radar with DBF

Abstract

In conventional Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) the azimuth resolution and the swath width are two parameters that can not be improved simultaneously. A new concept called High Resolution Hide-Swath (HRWS) has been designed to loose the dependence between those two contradicting parameters. For this purpose Digital Beam-Forming (DBF) algorithms are implemented both in azimuth and in elevation direction. A simulation have been conducted to estimate the performance in elevation of a SAR system with DBF and possible nonlinearities and distortions in receive front-end. The interest of the research is focused on the performance of a system with high number of receive channels. One of the aspects of the simulation is low bit quantization. In this paper the results form HRWS SAR simulation and measurements results of the HRWS demonstrator with one bit quantization are compared.