Passive location developments in Elettronica SpA: System applications

Passive Location techniques (PL) are of primary importance in the field of Electronic Warfare. In 2004, Elettronica SpA (ELT) started the design of fast PL techniques using coherent receivers and advanced DSP methods. Such techniques jointly exploit the Frequency Difference Of Arrival (FDOA) and the Time Difference Of Arrival (TDOA) of the incoming signal to achieve reliable estimates of the emitter location in short time (few seconds). Nowadays, this function is part of an Electronic Support Measure (ESM) System produced by ELT, currently operational on a Maritime Patrol Aircraft (MPA). In this work, we describe further advances for this function in terms of both theoretical formulation and system architecture used on MPA. In addition, we provide experimental results obtained exploiting live recorded data.