First Results From Airborne Passive Radar Measurements And Aircraft Detection Exploiting Digital TV Broadcast Signals

New results of air-to-air target detection using airborne passive radar are presented. The detections are obtained by acquiring and processing data from an airborne passive sensor which receives DVB-T signals from digital-TV transmitters. The signal processing chain includes the following steps: decoding of the DVB-T signal, generation of a mismatched reference signal to suppress ambiguities, motion compensation and beam formation using three antenna channels for enhancing the signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio. A ground-based station is used to receive and demodulate the DVB-T signal in order to mitigate the large Doppler shifts of multi-path signals. The ground station data is synchronized to the airborne data using correlation techniques. An example result shows that a cooperative aircraft, located at 5 km distance, becomes detectable.