Polarimetric agile radar is able to measure all elements of the polarization-dependent backscattering matrix (BSM) simultaneously. Polarimetric calibration is an important issue to determine the BSM accurately. This paper focuses mainly on the internal and semi-external calibration of the dual-channel polarimetric agile radar system. The paper presents a novel approach based on very up to date methods used for cross-validation between simulations and measurements. Error models of all parts of the radar system will be derived from the approach and implemented in the radar system calibration. After calibration, the good matching performance for relative measurement between two channels demonstrates the validity of the here-proposed calibration approach.@en

The article describes the IRCTR PARSAX radar system. It is an S-band high-resolution Doppler polarimetric FMCW radar utilizing dual-orthogonal sounding signals. The signals allow for measuring in one sweep all elements of the radar targets polarization scattering matrix simultaneously. PARSAX characteristics are: modular system set-up, highly-optimised linearity and sensitivity of the RF front-end receiver, use of a flexible multi-channel arbitrary waveform generator as sounding waveforms source, high-resolution analogue to digital conversion of the received signals at sufficiently high intermediate frequency and FPGA-based programmable digital multi-channel receiver. The paper shows that PARSAX is a unique radar research platform for studying arbitrary sounding waveforms with bandwidth up to 50 MHz and processing algorithms in Doppler-polarimetric radar.@en

Polarimetric agile radar is able to measure all elements of the polarization-dependent backscattering matrix (BSM) simultaneously. Polarimetric calibration is an important issue to determine the BSM accurately. This paper focuses mainly on the internal and semi-external calibration of the dual-channel polarimetric agile radar system. The paper presents a novel approach based on very up to date methods used for cross-validation between simulations and measurements. Error models of all parts of the radar system will be derived from the approach and implemented in the radar system calibration. After calibration, the good matching performance for relative measurement between two channels demonstrates the validity of the here-proposed calibration approach.@en

The article describes the IRCTR PARSAX radar system - fully polarimetric FMCW radar with dual-orthogonal sounding signals, which has the possibility to measure all elements of the radar targets polarization scattering matrix simultaneously, in one sweep.@en