Bistatic SAR processing and experiments

Bistatic synthetic aperture radar (SAR) uses a separated transmitter and receiver flying on different platforms to achieve benefits like exploitation of additional information contained in the bistatic reflectivity of targets, reduced vulnerability for military applications, forward-looking SAR imaging, or increased radar cross section. Besides technical problems such as synchronization of the oscillators, involved adjustment of transmit pulse versus receive gate timing, antenna pointing, flight coordination, and motion compensation, the development of a bistatic focusing algorithm is still in progress and not sufficiently solved. As a step to a numerically efficient processor, this paper presents a bistatic range migration algorithm for the translationally invariant case, where transmitter and receiver have equal velocity vectors. In this paper, the algorithm was successfully applied to simulated and real bistatic data. The real bistatic data have been acquired with the Forschungsgesellschaft fur Angewandte Naturwissenschaften (FGAN)'s X-band SAR systems, namely the Airborne Experimental Radar 11 and the Phased Array Multifunctional Imaging Radar, in October 2003.