B. Hauck et al., POLARIMETRIC BISTATIC MEASUREMENT FACILITY FOR POINT AND DISTRIBUTED TARGETS, IEEE antennas & propagation magazine, 40(1), 1998, pp. 31-41
A fully polarimetric bistatic-radar facility has been constructed at t
he University of Michigan, to serve as a research tool for improved un
derstanding of the nature of bistatic scattering for point and distrib
uted targets. The facility is capable of operation at 10, 35, and 94 G
Hz, but only the 10-GHz system will be described in this presentation.
To meet both the size and design constraints both a horn antenna oper
ating in the far-field, and a parabolic-dish antenna operating in a ne
ar-field focused mode, are utilized. A newly developed bistatic-calibr
ation technique, using a flat metal plate, is used to calibrate the fa
cility. Validation results, using a hemisphere over a conducting metal
plate, show that the facility is capable of characterizing the radar
cross section of a point target to within +/-1 dB in magnitude and +/-
5 degrees in polarization phase difference over a wide range of bistat
ic angles. Sample data for a point target and a distributed target are
presented.