Publications
Optimal antenna beamwidth for stripmap SAR
The classical rule-of-thumb for Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is that a uniformly illuminated antenna aperture may allow continuous stripmap imaging to a resolution of half its azimuth dimension. This is applied to classical line-by-line processing as well as mosaicked image patches, that is, a stripmap formed from mosaicked spotlight images; often the more efficient technique often used in real-time systems. However, as with all rules-of-thumb, a close inspection reveals some flaws. In particular, with mosaicked patches there is significant Signal to Noise ratio (SNR) degradation at the edges of the patches due to antenna beam roll-off. We present in this paper a calculation for the optimum antenna beamwidth as a function of resolution that maximizes SNR at patch edges. This leads to a wider desired beamwidth than the classical calculation. © 2010 SPIE.