Suppression of Range Ambiguity in Spaceborne SAR With Elevation Beam Pattern Mask Design

In this letter, we present a method to design an elevation beam pattern mask for spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to reduce the range ambiguity. The proposed two-way elevation beam pattern mask, which requires relatively low sidelobe levels only in the direction of strong range ambiguous echoes, can be highly suitable for enhancing the range ambiguity to signal ratio (RASR). The power levels of the different ambiguous echoes are estimated based on the backscattering coefficient model and satellite geometry. To meet the two-way beam pattern mask, both transmit and receive beam patterns are synthesized simultaneously through the minimax algorithm. To confirm the effectiveness of this mask design method, the RASR performance is evaluated by using various swaths.