During the SAXON-FPN experiment, the authors mounted two continuous wave microwave systems on an elevator on the German Research Platform Nordsee for the purpose of investigating the dependence of microwave backscatter from the sea surface on illuminated area. The two systems operated at X and Ka bands (10 and 35 GHz) and collected HH and VV polarized backscattered signals simultaneously. The elevator system allowed them to vary the altitude of the two microwave systems above the sea surface from 7.5 to 27 m, always in the far field of the antennas. Most data were collected at a 45 degrees incidence angle, which implied that the Ka band system illuminated areas from 0.4 to 6.0 m while the X band system viewed spots between 2.9 and 41.3 m/sup 2/. The authors examined the dependence of the normalized radar cross section ( sigma /sub 0/), its variance, and the bandwidth of the Doppler spectrum on illuminated areas. Values for the normalized variance of an elementary scattering facet were inferred and presented. From the Doppler bandwidths they obtained radial velocity spreads over the illuminated areas.
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