A dual mode digital processor for medium resolution synthetic aperture radars

A dual-mode digital processor has been developed for the real-time processing of the azimuth Doppler histories from an airborne synthetic aperture radar. Two operational modes are possible: a semi-focused single-look mode, yielding optimal resolution, and an unfocused multi-look mode, yielding reduced speckling. A hardware implementation of a digital processor having eight filters is considered and a computer simulation is described. Good agreement between predicted and simulated values is found.