Range resolved mode mixing in a large volume for the mitigation of speckle and strategic target orientation requirements in active millimeter-wave imaging.

In spite of many reports of active millimeter-wave imaging in the literature, speckle and requirements for cooperative target orientation significantly reduce its practical usefulness. Here we report a new technique, range resolved mode mixing (RRMM), which significantly mitigates both of these issues. It also provides a three-dimensional (3D) image. RRMM accomplishes this by combining multimode illumination (which eliminates the requirement for cooperative target orientation) with range resolution (which provides statistical independence of speckle patterns for averaging and the 3D image). The use of a 5W extended interaction klystron amplifier results in large signal margins in the 50 m scale atrium of the Physics Department at Ohio State University. It appears that there are a number of scenarios out to a range of 1 km for which this approach is useful to provide 3D images, with minimal speckle, and no requirement for cooperative target orientation.