Analysis and experimental results on sparse-array synthetic impulse and aperture radar

Sparse-array synthetic impulse and aperture radar (SIAR) is a new concept of 4D radar, based on the use of a transmit array, simultaneously radiating a set of orthogonal waveforms, and of a reception array, delivering sampled signals to a processing equipment, dedicated to Doppler filtering, time-space beamforming (including a transmitting beam and a receiving beam by calculation), and target extraction, thus, it can isotropically radiate. This radar adopt sparse arrays to improve its angle resolution. This paper introduces the principle of the SIAR, discusses some questions (including optimization of the frequency coding of the transmitting signal. to eliminate the coupling effects between distance and angles, a low-range-sidelobe technique based on frequency-coding agility among these frequencies and application of large time-bandwidth signals) and presents a description of the experiment system. Finally, some experiment results are given. Moreover, the strong agreement observed on both experiment and theoretical results.