Development of Ultra-Wideband Software Defined Radar Testbed to support SAR Tomographic Mission Formulation

Recent innovations in small satellite, ultra-wideband direct RF sampling, and synchronization technologies have made multistatic and MIMO coherent SAR constellations a feasible concept for future missions. The Distributed Aperture Radar Tomographic Sensors (DARTS) mission concept at NASA JPL aims to measure Earth’s surface topography and vegetation using TomoSAR techniques. This paper describes the development of an embedded ultra-wideband next generation software defined radar (SDRadar) testbed capable of multi-band operation implemented with the Xilinx RF System on Chip (RFSoC) architecture, which features 8x 6.4 GSPS DACs and 8x 4 GSPS ADCs. The RFSoC SDRadar represents a state of the art testbed for rapid prototyping of radio, radar, and synchronization technologies. We provide preliminary testing results for airborne monostatic radar imaging from a small uninhabited aerial system (sUAS), successfully demonstrating multi-band operation using first and second Nyquist zone direct RF sampling.