Approach of range ambiguity suppression for spaceborne SAR based on LCMV algorithm

The range ambiguity suppression is a key problem in the design of the spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system. Increasing the antenna height can solve this problem. But usually the satellite platform can not load the large antenna, which restricts the size of the antenna. The importance of suppressing the range ambiguity for observing the wide swath and producing the high quality radar image was pointed out. The mathematical model of the range ambiguity was described and a new concept was presented, i.e., the distributed range ambiguity signal ratio (DRASR). The difference between the average range ambiguity signal ratio (ARASR) and the DRASR was analyzed. An approach of the range ambiguity suppression for the space-borne SAR based on the linearly constrained minimum variance (LCMV) algorithm was proposed. Simulation results prove that this approach not only increases ARASR, but also improves DRASR under the condition that the antenna height is not needed to be changed.