An Efficient Method for Performance Monitoring of Active Phased Array Antennas

Modern synthetic aperture radars (SARs) are equipped with active phased array antennas to electronically generate various antenna beams. The TerraSAR-X satellite is a high resolution SAR system launched in June 2007. Its active phased array X-band antenna hosts 384 transmit/receive modules (TRMs) fo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on geoscience and remote sensing 2009-04, Vol.47 (4), p.1236-1243
Main Authors: Brautigam, B., Schwerdt, M., Bachmann, M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Active control
Active phased array antenna
Antenna arrays
Antennas
Aperture antennas
Applied geophysics
Beam steering
Beams (radiation)
Directive antennas
Earth sciences
Earth, ocean, space
Electronics
Exact sciences and technology
internal calibration
Internal geophysics
Mathematical models
Monitoring
Phased arrays
Receiving antennas
Satellites
Spaceborne radar
Synthetic aperture radar
synthetic aperture radar (SAR)
TerraSAR-X
transmit/receive modules (TRMs)
Transmitting antennas
X-band
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Summary:Modern synthetic aperture radars (SARs) are equipped with active phased array antennas to electronically generate various antenna beams. The TerraSAR-X satellite is a high resolution SAR system launched in June 2007. Its active phased array X-band antenna hosts 384 transmit/receive modules (TRMs) for controlling the electronic beam steering in azimuth and elevation direction. The precise modeling of the antenna performance is only possible if the actual characteristics of each individual TRM are monitored. TerraSAR-X has been equipped with an innovative characterization mode based on a coding technique, which is the so-called pseudonoise gating method. The individual and simultaneous characterization of all TRMs is realized under most realistic conditions with power supply loads like in nominal radar operation. For the first time, this novel technique has been applied on a spaceborne SAR system.
ISSN:0196-2892
1558-0644
DOI:10.1109/TGRS.2008.2008719