A New Efficient Simulator for Hybrid SAR Raw Signals

In the last years, the interest of the remote sensing scientific community for a new Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) operating mode, referred to as hybrid stripmap/spotlight mode, has widely increased. In the hybrid acquisition mode the radar antenna beam is steered about a point farther away from the radar than the area being illuminated, thus generating microwave images with an azimuth resolution better than that achieved in the stripmap configuration, and a ground coverage better than the one of the spotlight configuration. The subject of design, processing and data interpretation for the hybrid SAR mode is gaining an increasing interest. Consequently, a hybrid SAR raw signal simulator is strongly required, especially when real raw data are not available yet, to test processing algorithms and to help mission planning. In addition, to analyse the effects of processing errors and to verify the impact of different system design choices on the final image for different kinds of imaged scenes, an extended scene SAR raw signal simulator is very useful and it’s what we present in this paper.