Design of Low-Cost Active Reflectors for Advanced InSAR Applications: First Results

Differential SAR interferometry has been widely used in the last couple of decades to obtain accurate millimetric measurements of land displacements. Recently, to increase the number of measurement points and, hence, the accuracy of the attainable results, the deployment of active reflectors has been proposed. Whenever massive deployment of artificial reflectors is required availability of low-cost solutions is a key enabling factor. In this paper, after providing general guidelines for active reflectors design, a low-cost solution, based on the use of patch antenna arrays and a radio-frequency chain assembled using off-the-shelf components, is developed. Preliminary simulation results and laboratory measurements are presented.