Doctor's Degree Dr.-Ing. - Sigurd Huber

We are very glad to announce that our colleague Sigurd Huber defended his PhD yesterday at the faculty of Electrical Engineering of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) with great success. His clearly structured and professional presentation not only inspired his peers but also all present colleagues.

The title of his dissertation is "Spaceborne SAR Systems with Digital Beamforming and Reflector Antennas". Sigurd Huber works in Marwan Younis' group and developed and optimized a promising novel SAR concept that combines the advantages of large reflector antennas (narrow antenna beam/high gain) and digital phased arrays (high flexibility while forming antenna diagrams via digital beamforming).

An important contribution of his work is the development of optimized techniques for the combination of feed signals in real-time. On one hand, by using these new techniques the gain of received echoes can be maximized and on the other hand the contribution of ambiguities can be minimized. Another substantial contribution is the development of a reflector with two different focal levels which simultaneously distributes the power of an incoming plane wave to several feed elements. This leads in combination with the digital signal processing to a balanced performance for different incidence angles on the one hand and to a significant reduction of possible performance losses after fail of a feed element on the other hand. Sigurd's developments, hence, will play a critical role during the development of a high-performance SAR instrument for the Tandem-L mission. Dear Sigurd well done, congratulations!