Coherent radiometric imaging using antennas with beam synthesizing

Abstract

The paper is devoted to coherent radiometric imaging systems. The investigated systems may be considered as a version of bistatic noise waveform passive radar with synthetic aperture having external reference. Reference signal in this imaging system is received from the investigated emitting object using auxiliary receiver. Although a number of theoretical studies on aperture synthesis imaging algorithms exist, relatively few of them deal with experimental investigation. In particular, no information concerning range-azimuth coherent radiometric imaging has been found. In this paper, an experimental investigation of possibility to generate coherent radiometric images using two antennas with beam synthesizing is carried out. Indoor radiometric imaging has been validated using absorbers as the emitting objects. These experiments enabled to estimate range resolution of the radiometric system achieved by focusing antennas with beam synthesizing for range span limited by means about bistatic baseline.