DLR’s Dual-Polarized Offset Reflector Antenna with Digital Feed Array for Synthetic Aperture Radar

The German Aerospace Center (DLR) is currently developing a ground-based Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) with digital beamforming (DBF) capabilities for versatile scientific use. Primary focus of the project is on the reflector antenna and on the implementation of onboard DBF pre-processing concepts & data reduction in real-time. This paper describes the innovative contributions and challenges during the X-band offset reflector antenna design with 4x32 dual-polarized feed elements at a center frequency of 9.6 GHz.