Passive Radar at Hensoldt: A Review to the last Decade

Today, Passive Radar systems can be considered as a supplement or even a possible alternative to active radar systems for airspace surveillance and air traffic management. In large parts of the world broadcast networks and third-party communication services are available which reliably provide a multistatic and multiband illumination of the airspace. In the last decade, numerous experimental Passive Radar implementations have been built and tested by universities, research institutes and radar industry. Countless measurement campaigns have provided large amounts of data, and significant progress has been made to optimize the detection performance, coverage areas and operational reliability of Passive Radar systems. It has shown that the key to achieve mature and operational Passive Radar systems is a diversity-based approach, i.e. the efficient exploitation of multi-band, multi-transmitter and multi-site diversity effects. In this paper, the design considerations and design steps for the Hensoldt long-range Passive Radar system TwinVis are summarized.