X-band wideband experimental airborne radar for SAR, GMTI and maritime surveillance

Defence Research and Development Canada - Ottawa has completed Phase I in the development of a new multimode X-band wideband experimental airborne radar (XWEAR) to support studies in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging, inverse SAR (ISAR), ground moving target indication (GMTI) radar and maritime surveillance radar with particular focus on small target detection and long-range surface surveillance. Specific areas of interest include research into SAR imaging techniques for fixed and moving targets, time-frequency analysis of ocean and land moving targets, space-time adaptive processing for application to GMTI, investigation into the electromagnetic backscatter properties of the ocean surface, generation of signatures for automatic target recognition and feature extraction, and analysis on the immunity of wide bandwidth systems against electronic countermeasures. Phase I culminated with the flight trialling of the SAR and maritime surveillance modes. Phase 11 will see the trialling of the wide area surveillance GMTI (WAS GMTI) and integrated SAR-GMTI modes. A description of the experimental radar is given along with an overview of its data collection capability. Distinguishing features include operation at X-band, single-channel operation for SAR and maritime surveillance, and two-channel operation for WAS-GMTI and integrated SAR-GMTI. The new radar maximises the use of an existing digital scan converter as a controller, and commercially available components including the transmitter, A/D converters and computer boards. The timing circuitry, waveform generator, single- and dual-channel receivers are custom built.