Optimized radar design parameters for synthetic aperture radar with limited swath

In areas of conflict around the globe, buried or obscured explosive hazards pose a frequent danger to both civilians and military personnel. Research in radar technology to preemptively detect these hazards has been ongoing for more than two decades. The U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) is currently developing a low noise, ultra-wideband, spectrally-agile radar system to be implemented on an aerial platform. An airborne ground- penetrating radar (GPR) simulation was developed to aid future hardware design efforts. Measured antenna beam patterns are input into the simulation and used to calculate the antenna’s footprint on the ground. With the antenna footprint specified, resolution cells are created within the footprint based on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) phenomenology. A 2D-Gaussian function is used to represent the main lobe of the antenna (which is derived from the 3-dB beam-width of the antenna in the E- and H-planes). The radar cross section (RCS) of each resolution cell is then found using a model for normalized clutter RCS, which incorporates the system geometry. Point-like and distributed targets can be inserted into the simulation by adjusting the RCS of specific resolution cells. Finally, these parameters are implemented in a signal model, and different waveforms can be simulated, and their peak side lobe level (PSLL) and integrated side lobe ratio (ISLR) can be compared.