Multi-Band Airborne SAR/GMTI System Development

A multi-band airborne synthetic aperture radar and ground moving-target indicating (SAR/GMTI) radar system will be designed and developed that will utilize multiple frequency bands to improve the radar imaging and target detection performance in various clutter environments. Applied Radar’s existing wideband digital receiver/exciter (DREX) hardware is inherently capable of supporting radar applications from HF through Ka-bands. Switching in various transmit/receive (T/R) front ends will allow the DREX hardware to be used in various discrete radar bands such as UHF, S, L, C or X-band, with a common digital back-end. A wideband common-aperture antenna is needed to support these various frequency bands, and will be a focal point of this research and development. Existing Applied Radar Vivaldi antenna designs currently support ~10:1 bandwidth, which would cover for example S-band through X-band. We are looking to extend this coverage down to UHF so that the developed system would cover UHF through X-band. In Phase I, requirements and specifications for the multi-band SAR/GMTI system will be developed, which will be implemented in a rooftop system in Phase II. In Phase III, the airborne radar will be flown on Applied Radar’s corporate aircraft testbed. BENEFIT: The proposed airborne SAR/GMTI system has application for both military and commercial applications including homeland security border patrol, search and rescue, and environmental/geographic sensing. While other airborne SAR/GMTI systems currently exist, the proposed effort will attempt to extend the frequency coverage over existing systems to cover multiple frequency bands, and will also reduce system cost by focusing on a lightweight system that can eventually be implemented on a medium-sized UAV such as a Predator drone.