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In this study, a method was proposed to develop a compact antenna for a drone-borne synthetic aperture radar(SAR). The compact antenna structure was designed as a microstrip patch antenna, and a parasitic patch was stacked on the radiation patch to improve the bandwidth and gain of the antenna. The size and interval between patches were iteratively adjusted based on the simulation in order to satisfy the requirements of the antenna. Additionally, HH-, VV-, HV-, and VH-polarimetric antennas were fabricated to acquire fully polarimetric SAR data. As a result, the compact antenna could be successfully developed with a small weight of less than 100 grams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the back-projection algorithm(BPA) is the best method for image reconstruction of air-borne synthetic-aperture radar(SAR), it requires a long processing time. In this study, a real-time processing method of BPA was proposed to reconstruct the image of a compact drone-borne SAR in real time. To achieve this, the raw data of the SAR was acquired by a test flight with SAR based on frequency-modulated continuous wave(FMCW) radar. The performance of the BPA was confirmed by using raw data and a modified BPA processing kernel based on graphics processing unit(GPU) technology. The results confirmed the possibility of real-time image reconstruction of SAR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]