Experimental Research of Multistatic Passive Radar With a Single Antenna for Drone Detection

Digital television signals are attractive illuminations of opportunity for the passive radars in the field of low altitude and slow speed target detection. The digital television standard permits reconstruction of a reference signal using the received signal in surveillance channel, which enables a single-antenna digital television based passive radar (SDPR) processing. This paper investigates the practical feasibility of a multistatic SDPR (MSDPR) for the drone detection. First, the detection range of the SDPR is analyzed in terms of signal processing procedures involving multipath energy, extracted reference signal purity, and receiving antenna. Second, according to the characteristics of the SDPR, the reference signal extraction is analyzed. In addition, considering that the SDPR cannot locate and track the detected target, a novel MSDPR processing method is proposed. The core idea of this method is to use the optimal reference signal extracted from the receiving station with the least interference as the shared reference signal in MSDPR, which can greatly improve the system detection capability. Finally, the small drone detection experiments using the MSDPR are presented. The theoretical considerations are demonstrated using the experimental data.