Wide-bandwidth continuous-wave monostatic/bistatic synthetic aperture radar imaging

Monostatic and bistatic synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging systems with wide-bandwidth continuous-wave (WB-CW) sources have been utilized for military reconnaissance. The WB-CW sources are less susceptible than FM-CW sources to electronic counter measures (ECM). The main shortcoming of the WB-CW microwave illumination is that its resultant SAR echoed signal is not composed of distinct Doppler spreadings around specific tones; this creates difficulties to formulate the image formation in the WB-CW SAR systems via the conventional pulse or FM-CW SAR imaging algorithms. The paper outlines a time domain correlation (TDC) processing method and a Fourier-based processing method for image formation in WB-CW monostatic and bistatic SAR systems. Results are provided.