New aspects of bistatic SAR: processing and experiments

The interest in bistatic synthetic aperture radar, using separated transmitter and receiver flying on different platforms, has been increasing rapidly over the last years. The reason for this is specific advantages, like the reduced vulnerability in military systems, forward looking SAR imaging, additional information about the target, or increased RCS. Nevertheless, besides technical problems - like the synchronisation of the oscillators, the involved adjustment of transmit pulse versus receive gate timing, antenna pointing, flight coordination, double trajectory measurement and motion compensation - the processing of bistatic radar data is still not sufficiently solved. Some of the possibilities and problems discussed. The second part of This work deals with a bistatic experiment performed in November 2003: two SAR systems of FGAN have been flown on two different airplanes, the AER-II system has been used as a transmitter and the PAMIR system as a receiver. Different spatially invariant flight geometries have been tested. High resolution bistatic SAR images were generated successfully.