DoA Estimation Based on a ULA of Commercial Antennas in Semi-urban Passive Radar Scenario

Direction of Arrival (DoA) estimator based on Uniform Linear Array (ULA) is designed and validate in a semi-urban DVB-T passive radar scenario. Commercial UHF antennas (Televes 4G NOVA) were considered as individual array elements taking into account the requirement of using COTS components in order to provide a low-cost surveillance solution. A ULA of five elements was designed and deterministic beamformers were applied in two stages: the first one in centered in a CFAR detection at the output of the spatial filtering to obtain velocity and range estimation of targets and the second stage corresponds to a Doa estimator based on ESPRIT (Estimation of Signal Parameter via Rotational Invariance Techniques) algorithm to include azimuth information to the target 2-D localization. Results are validated using IDEPAR (DVB-T passive radar system) confirming its capabilities as a terrestrial traffic monitoring tool.