Synthetic Aperture Radar using Emitters of Opportunity

The capability of a radar imaging system to stay undetected while gathering data is one of the most desired for military reconnaissance systems. This is particularly difficult to achieve for synthetic aperture radar (SAR), that have to emit electromagnetic energy all the time during the operation and to move along a strictly defined route. Therefore the idea of a passive imaging system although encountering many constraints seems to be very interesting. The possibilities of a passive synthetic aperture radar system working with different types of emitters of opportunity are described in the paper. Impact of signal characteristics on image quality and geometry issues are discussed among others. Results of computer simulations of such a system implementing different imaging algorithms as well as the results of the experiment performed with passive SAR system model are presented.