On the Importance of the Accuracy of the Estimate of the Radar Position for Fully Coherent Jamming of a Stripmap SAR Sensor

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has become a standard sensor for military intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance-based operations. Jamming of SAR sensors has become an important topic, especially to deny the use of the sensor or to induce false targets into the image to degrade the response time of a military user. A SAR sensor uses coherent integration of radar pulses to generate cross-range resolution during the creation of an image of an area. A jammer thus has to recreate an accurate representation of the phase trajectory of the radar pulse train to induce false targets into the SAR image. To achieve this, the jammer requires an accurate estimate of the position of the SAR sensor. This paper presents a simulation-based analysis of the accuracy with which a jammer is required to estimate the position of the SAR platform to enable fully coherent jamming. Fully coherent jamming is required for effective deception jamming of SAR sensors. The results show that angular accuracies in the order of millidegrees and range accuracies in the order of 10’s of metres are required to achieve fully coherent jamming against an X-band SAR.