A Study on Transmission Signal Design Using DAC to Reduce IQ Imbalance of Satellite-Mounted Synthetic Aperture Radar Transmitter

Abstract

The on-board processor of satellite synthetic aperture radar(SAR) generates transmission signal by digital signal processing, converts it into an analog signal. At this time, the transmission signal generated from the baseband requires the frequency modulation to convert it to the high-frequency band in order to improve the stability. General frequency modulation method using local oscillator(LO) causes IQ imbalance due to phase error/magnitude error and these error reduce performance of SAR. To generate transmission signal without phase/magnitude error, this paper suggests design method of the frequency modulation method using digital to analog converter(DAC) at on-board SAR. For design, this paper analyzes the characteristic of DAC mode and uses pre-compensation filter. To analyze the proposed method performance, performance index are compared with IQ imbalance signals. This method is suitable for on-board SAR using fast sampling DAC and has the advantage of being able to solve IQ imbalances.