Design and Development of a Miniature C-band RF Transceiver for Synthetic Aperture Radar

摘要

Synthetic Aperture Radar is an effective tool for earth's resource monitoring. Typical SAR systems are operated on satellites, spacecrafts or airplanes. Recently, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has become an alternative flying platform for SAR. The main reason of choosing UAV is due to its capability to fly and operate remotely without the crew or pilot on the flying platform. Moreover, a small UAV can operate at lower power and fuel consumption, hence reducing the overall operating cost. However, due to its space and weight constraints, it is a challenging task to design a UAV-based SAR sensor. Most of the commercially available RF components are in standard sizes and some are too bulky to be fitted into the flying platform. Thus, the design of a miniature RF transceiver is of great interest. Main components of the RF transceiver include an up-convert mixer, a power amplifier, a high power amplifier, a low noise amplifier, a down-convert mixer, a band-pass filter and a low-pass filter. The RF transceiver will operate in C-band, with more than 30 dB gain in total. This paper highlights the design of a miniature RF transceiver module for UAV-based SAR.