An Introduction To Passive Radar

Developed by recognized experts in the field, this first-of-its-kind resource introduces the basic principles of passive radar technology and provides an overview of recent developments in this field and existing real passive radar systems. This book explains how passive radar works, how it differs from the active type, and demonstrates the benefits and drawbacks of this novel technology. Properties of illuminators, including ambiguity functions, digital vs. analog, digitally-coded waveforms, vertical-plane coverage, and satellite-borne and radar illuminators are explored. Readers find practical guidance on direct signal suppression, passive radar performance prediction, and detection and tracking. This book provides concrete examples of systems and results, including analog TV, FM radio, cell phone base stations, DVB–T and DAB, HF skywave transmissions, indoor WiFi, satellite-borne illuminators, and low-cost scientific remote sensing. Future developments and applications of passive radar are also presented.

This bestselling book – now in its second edition – introduces the basic principles of passive radar technology and provides a comprehensive overview of the recent developments and advances in this field. It shows you how passive radar works, how it differs from the active type, and helps you understand the benefits and drawbacks of this novel technology. The book gives you the knowledge you need to get a full understanding of this fascinating technology. All chapters have been fully revised and updated and are written in a clear and accessible style. New chapters have been added to cover advances in the technology that have already been built and demonstrated, including systems on moving platforms (aircraft and UAVs), as well as advances in types of transmission – notably single-frequency broadcast transmissions, and 5G – and in processing techniques. This book remains an important resource for engineers working in academic, industry, or government research laboratories; academics teaching graduate level students; and those working in the specification and procurement of radar systems who need to understand the performance and limitations of the technology.

This cutting-edge resource introduces the basic concepts of passive bistatic radar, such as bistatic geometry, bistatic radar equation and analysis of different illuminating signals. These techniques, although known for almost a century, have not been developed intensively for decades, mainly due to technical limitations, but today, the passive radar concept can be realized in practice, and is of great interest for military and civilian users. This book provides insight into understanding the potential and limitations of passive radar systems, as well as the differences between signal processing in active and passive radar. Each of the signal processing stages typically applied in passive radar is described, including digital beamforming, clutter removal, target detection, localization and tracking. These concepts are illustrated with both simulated and measured data along with examples of passive radar systems. Correlation processing, which is crucial for passive radar operation, is presented, as well as practical approaches for calculating the cross-ambiguity function. The problems of range and velocity-cell migration are also introduced. The book analyzes and compares different antenna array geometries to show readers the appropriate solution for a particular scenario of passive radar. Cartesian tracking is also presented, based on the extended Kalman filter. Parallel and sequential updating approaches are introduced and compared. These concepts are illustrated with both simulated and measured data along with examples of passive radar systems, making this book useful for both novice and advanced practitioners.

Airspace surveillance is one of the classic applications of radar technology. Existing systems are focused on large-scale surveillance of commercial airspace. This research presents a prototype of a small, mobile, passive radar system that for example can be used to monitor aircraft and UAVs in the airspace over maritime borders. The system is based on a coherent, software defined receiving system for data acquisition. The signal processing is subsequently performed in the digital domain. The paper gives an introduction to all the required fundamentals and all the relevant steps of signal processing are shown, starting from digital beamforming, through the generation of the range Doppler matrices, all the way to the tracking of targets using Kalman filters. Furthermore, a novel system for the detection of transmitter locations is presented, which allows the use of such a system in previously unknown scenarios. Finally, measurements are presented to show what such a system can achieve under real world conditions.

This book provides an exhaustive overview of techniques, challenges and applications that are enabled when a passive radar is operated from a moving platform.

Interest on passive radar has recently grown because of the increasing availability of electromagnetic emitters, the limited costs and the wide range of concerned applications. Passive Radar systems, also termed as Passive Coherent Location systems (PCL), exploit reflections from illuminators of opportunity in order to detect and track objects. A PCL receiver generally presents two receiving channels denoted as reference and target channels. It is evident that the performance of such systems is strictly related to the main characteristics of the illuminator of opportunity. Passive radars based on analogue signals show detection performance strongly dependent on the signal content. In other words, the spectral properties of the signals, as well as the transmitted powers are heavily related to the type of the transmitted information.Passive radar systems are specific variants of bistatic radar that exploit existing transmitters as "illuminators of opportunity". The main advantages of bistatic radar are that the receiver is far less vulnerable to electronic counter measures (ECM) and that biostatic operation has counter stealth properties. Moreover, passive radar systems have much lower cost, as they do not need a dedicated transmitter. Inspite of all these advantages, which make passive radar attractive for a broad range of applications, they must cope with the use of nonoptimized waveforms and with a strong direct signal from the transmitter of opportunity that typically operates in continuous wave (CW) mode. Passive radar, a different type of radar technology, is set to be the next big thing in military radar applications. This book 'Passive Radar' brings together up-to-date information of the current research directions and applications of passive radar. It covers the basic principles of passive radar technology and delves into the recent developments in this field and existing real passive radar systems. This book explains how passive radar works, how it differs from the active type, and demonstrates the benefits and drawbacks of this novel technology.