Microwave interferometric radiometer with uniform circular antenna array

Abstract

Microwave interferometric radiometer (MIR) is a passive sensor using synthetic aperture technique for microwave remote sensing. Antenna array configuration is the first concern for the MIR application. Various array configurations have been proposed. This paper presents the analysis of the circular array performance and compares it with the Y-shaped array and hexagonal array. Based on the early developed theory about the radiometric resolution, two new factors named as sampling sensitivity factor and uncertainty factor are firstly introduced and defined in this paper, which can be used to quantitatively characterize the array performance. Numerical simulations with analysis are finally implemented to verify the theoretical results and also to demonstrate the superiority of the circular array in terms of radiometric sensitivity and RFI mitigation.