Theory and experiments on hard-limited SAR imaging

Known results in the area of hard-limited array theory are extended and generalized for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) applications in order to obtain a significant reduction of the required transmission channel bandwidth. The results provide a theoretical basis for subsequent numerical experiments related to the SIR-B mission. The SAR signal is hard-limited (at the offset frequency, after the heterodyne process) and filtered, and the restored signal is processed in the conventional way to obtain the image of the pertinent scene. Results of this experiment may be useful in assessing image degradation due to 1-b coding