SAR application of a signal coding technique for single‐hit measurement of the target scattering matrix

A new technique for the simultaneous measurement of all the target scattering matrix elements, recently proposed for general application to polarimetric radars, is analyzed for specific application to a fully polarimetric SAR. With reference to a focused SAR, the new concept of homopolar and heteropolar generalized ambiguity functions is introduced to evaluate the performance of the proposed technique in the presence of distributed targets, comparing it with the performance of the conventional polarimetric measurement technique based on pulse‐to‐pulse polarization switching. The possibility of synthesizing the heteropolar ambiguity function by means of pulse‐to‐pulse coding in order to improve performance of the single‐hit measurement technique is also pointed out.