Adaptive array antenna for satellite cellular and direct broadcast communications

Adaptive phased-array antennas provide cost-effective implementation of large, light weight apertures with high directivity and precise beamshape control. Adaptive self-calibration allows for relaxation of all mechanical tolerances across the aperture and electrical component tolerances, providing high performance with a low-cost, lightweight array, even in the presence of large physical distortions. Beam-shape is programmable and adaptable to changes in technical and operational requirements. Adaptive digital beam-forming eliminates uplink contention by allowing a single electronically steerable antenna to service a large number of receivers with beams which adaptively focus on one source while eliminating interference from others. A large, adaptively calibrated and fully programmable aperture can also provide precise beam shape control for power-efficient direct broadcast from space. Advanced adaptive digital beamforming technologies are described for: (1) electronic compensation of aperture distortion, (2) multiple receiver adaptive space-time processing, and (3) downlink beam-shape control. Cost considerations for space-based array applications are also discussed

Performance comparison of reflector and AESA-based digital beamforming for small satellite spaceborne SAR

Spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors play an ever increasingly important role in Earth observation in the fields of science, geomatics, defence, commercial products and services. The user community requirements for large, high temporal and spatial resolution swaths has driven the need for low-cost, high-performance systems. The increasing availability of commercial launch vehicles shall bolster the manufacturing and industrialisation of a smaller class sensor. This work deals with the performance comparison between a small satellite class planar array and reflector antenna system. Here the focus lies on digital beamforming techniques for the operation in wide-swath, high-resolution stripmap mode. For this the sensor sensitivity and ambiguity suppression performance in range and azimuth are derived. The Jupyter notebook environment with code in the Python language served as a convenient mechanism for modelling and verifying different performance aspects. These performance metrics are simulated and verified against existing systems. The limitations the spherical Earth geometry has on the transmitter timing and the imaged scene are derived. This together with the SAR platform orbital characteristics lead to the establishment of antenna design constraints. A planar array and reflector system are modelled with common design specifications and compared to a sea ice monitoring scenario. The use of digital beamforming techniques together with a high gain reflector antenna surface provided evidence that a reflector antenna would serve as a feasible alternative to planar arrays for spaceborne SAR missions

Radar systems for the water resources mission, volume 2

The application of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) in monitoring and managing earth resources was examined. The function of spaceborne radar is to provide maps and map imagery to be used for earth resource and oceanographic applications. Spaceborne radar has the capability of mapping the entire United States regardless of inclement weather; however, the imagery must have a high degree of resolution to be meaningful. Attaining this resolution is possible with the SAR system. Imagery of the required quality must first meet mission parameters in the following areas: antenna patterns, azimuth and range ambiguities, coverage, and angle of incidence

Design and Realisation of a Synthetic Aperture Radar Transmitter

Projecte fet en col.laboració amb el centre Vrije Universiteit BrusselIn this master degree project a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) transmitter is designed and realized. This transmitter will be used in the Signal Theory and Communications lab of Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya as a test transmitter because the actual transmitters, which are two satellites from the European Space Agency, only provide a few seconds of testing every few weeks. This is not su cient to continuously improve the sophisticated receiver subsystems. It was mainly focussed on the design, layout and building of the analog microwave subsystems but also some programming skills were necessary to generate the required input signal. By means of two synchronized direct digital synthesizers, two linearly frequency sweeping signals (chirps) at low-frequency band (base band) are generated and two mixers upconvert these signals to a high-frequency band around a carrier at 5.3 GHz. The carriers are provided by a quadrature hybrid, which splits the high-frequent sine wave from the local oscillator in an in-phase signal and a signal 90 degrees shifted in phase to the latter one (quadrature signal). Both outputs from the mixers are recombined by a power combiner, ltered and ampli ed by a low-noise ampli er and a power ampli er to obtain the required test signal. The testing of the transmitter was a great success in which theory went hand in hand with practice. The realization of this project will be one of the required assets for further groundbreaking developments in the SAR research domain

Antenna Modeller for Synthetic Aperture Radar Applications. Electromagnetic and Radiometric Considerations

The objective of the present Master Thesis is designing an optimizer of the excitation coefficients of a phased array antenna

The Second Spaceborne Imaging Radar Symposium

Summaries of the papers presented at the Second Spaceborne Imaging Radar Symposium are presented. The purpose of the symposium was to present an overwiew of recent developments in the different scientific and technological fields related to spaceborne imaging radars and to present future international plans

Spaceborne synthetic aperture radar pilot study

A pilot study of a spaceborne sidelooking radar is summarized. The results of the system trade studies are given along with the electrical parameters for the proposed subsystems. The mechanical aspects, packaging, thermal control and dynamics of the proposed design are presented. Details of the data processor are given. A system is described that allows the data from a pass over the U. S. to be in hard copy form within two hours. Also included are the proposed schedule, work breakdown structure, and cost estimate

Journal of Telecommunications and Information Technology, 2007, nr 1

kwartalni

The application of aperture synthesis techniques to satellite radar altimetry

Radar altimetry over the ocean is now a well established discipline of satellite remote sensing, providing measurements of mean height, significant waveheight and surface wind speed. In contrast, radar altimetry over non-ocean surfaces, to obtain topography of land and polar ice sheets, is still a new idea. The difference between these two situations is that the ocean surface is essentially flat with a very small vertical extent, so a broad-beam pulse-limited mode radar altimeter having a relatively small antenna is sufficient to give very accurate measurements of the ocean mean height. However for topographic surfaces, variations in the elevation can be much higher, and using a conventional altimeter causes serious problems, such as interpretation error and misregistration of a measured range, which cannot be normally corrected. To avoid these problems, a considerably narrower beam antenna has to be used to localise the surface under observation. This requires very large antenna structures, which would be both complex and costly. This thesis investigates the application of aperture synthesis techniques to narrow-beam altimetry as an alternative to physically large antennas, to achieve high along-track resolution. It considers the analysis of the involved factors and design parameters, errors, data handling and signal processing requirements and methods for fixing the antenna beam accurately with the ultimate goal of providing a dynamic global altimetric database. In the second half of the thesis, an experimental aircraft-borne altimeter is examined. Details of the design, construction and evaluation of a prototype system are described. This radar includes several novel features, such as aperture synthesis with full-deramp range processing, digital chirp generation, bistatic FMCW operation and off-line digital signal processing. Also a series of experiments are arranged for this radar to examine its performance to process the signature of corner reflector targets, and consideration is given to the extension of these ideas to a satellite-borne instrument