Multiband multistatic Passive Radar system for airspace surveillance: A step towards mature PCL implementations

Passive Radar systems present a novel approach to airspace surveillance. They use the target illumination by third-party transmitters, e.g. FM radio or TV broadcast stations, for air target detection and localisation. Due to the great number and wide frequency spacing of available transmitters the resulting multistatic and multiband illumination of air targets can be used to reliably obtain a wide-area air picture and to improve detection and tracking performance especially for low observable air targets. As no own transmitter is used Passive Radar systems are hard to detect and hard to jam and can potentially be implemented at low cost. For these reasons, interest in Passive Radar has grown significantly over the last years. However, most Passive Radar systems have been rather experimental set-ups tailored to a single frequency band or implemented as laboratory test devices. This paper describes the design, implementation and performance evaluation of a multi-band, multi-illuminator Passive Radar system. The result of this effort is a fully mobile FM/DAB/DVB Passive Radar system with cross-band data fusion capability. Multiple measurement campaigns with a great variety of third-party transmitters and arbitrary transmitter-target-receiver geometries have been conducted. In the paper, the design considerations and the resulting Passive Radar system structure are described and the evaluation of various measurement campaigns with this system are summarized.