Performance Analysis of Channel Imbalance Control and Azimuth Ambiguity Suppression in Azimuth Dual Receiving Antenna Mode of LT-1 Spaceborne SAR System

Abstract

The LuTan-1(LT-1), known as the L-band differential interferometric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite system, is an essential piece of civil infrastructure in China, providing extensive applications such as surface deformation monitoring and topographic mapping. To achieve high-resolution and wide-swath (HRWS) observation abilities, the LT-1 takes the dual receiving antenna (DRA) imaging mode as its working mode. However, amplitude and phase errors between channels lead to a mismatch between the reconstruction filter and the multichannel echo signal, worsen the reconstructed azimuth spectrum, and introduce ambiguity targets in the final imaging results, seriously affecting the final imaging quality. In order to better evaluate the channel error and azimuth ambiguity performance of the LT-1 system, this paper proposed an advanced channel consistency correction method and conducted many measured data experiments. The experimental results show that the proposed method is effective, and the LT-1 system has excellent channel error control and azimuth ambiguity performance.

Keywords

• synthetic aperture radar (SAR)
• azimuth ambiguity suppression
• high-resolution and wide-swath (HRWS)
• dual receive antenna (DRA)
• channel error estimation