This paper presents a study of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging based on random sparse array (RSA) and compressed sensing (CS) for target detection. Extensive numerical experiments based on real RSA measurement data are carried out and statistical analysis is performed to compare the performances of the CS technique and back-projection (BP) method using RSA. Performance analysis of the results show that RSA-CS method has better performance than the RSA-BP method and can achieve acceptable performance with much smaller data amount than full SAR imaging.