Evaluation of the internal calibration methodologies for spaceborne synthetic aperture radars with active phased array antennas

Eduardo Makhoul*, Antoni Broquetas, Paco Lopez Dekker, Josep Closa, Paula Saameno

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

12 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach in the instrumental error analysis of Synthetic Aperture Radars (SAR) based on active phased array antennas (APAA). A residual post-calibration error exists due to differences between the calibration and operational excitations of the transmit/receive modules (TRMs) for those source errors that are monitored by the internal calibration facility. Analytical expressions are derived for the residual post-calibration errors and validated through intensive simulations of some instrumental errors for a specific sensor architecture. Alternative internal global calibration strategies are proposed to reduce the impact of the post-calibration error. The simulations show that the proposed elevation dependent calibration can provide a substantial reduction of the post-calibration errors even in the case of relaxed tolerance of the TRM weight setting errors.

Original languageEnglish
Article number6218733
Pages (from-to)909-918
Number of pages10
JournalIEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing
Volume5
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2012
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • active phased array antenna (APAA)
  • internal calibration
  • Synthetic aperture radar (SAR)
  • transmit/receive modules (TRMs)

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