Design and performance evaluation of a FM / DAB / DVB-T multi-illuminator passive radar system

Passive Radar Systems use the target illumination by third-party transmitters, e.g. from broadcast or cellular base stations, for target detection and localisation. With the increasing maturity of passive radar technology, interest in these systems has grown significantly over the last years, and potential applications have been extended from airspace surveillance to ground and coastal target detection. This paper describes the design, implementation and performance evaluation of a mobile passive radar system developed at EADS Germany. Starting out from a FM-broadcast-based approach, the step to DAB-based and DVB-T-based operation has recently been made. As a result, a fully mobile FM/DAB/DVB multiband passive radar system is now available, offering maximum flexibility for measurement campaigns with air, ground and sea targets. Experiments with a great variety of third-party transmitters and arbitrary transmitter-target-receiver geometries have been conducted. In the paper, the underlying passive radar system concept is described and the results of representative measurement campaigns with different types of ground targets and aerial targets are presented.