Design and performance evaluation of a mature FM/DAB/DVB-T multi-illuminator passive radar system

Passive radar (PR) systems use the target illumination by third-party transmitters, for example, from broadcast or cellular base stations, for target detection and localisation. Since PR does not use an own transmitter, it can be installed and operated at low cost and it is hard to detect and jam. These advantages and the increasing maturity of PR technology has led to growing interest in these systems over the last years. However, until now most PR systems have been rather experimental set-ups tailored to a single frequency band or implemented as laboratory test devices. This study in contrast describes the design, implementation and performance evaluation of a multi-band, multi-illuminator PR system developed at near-production stage. Starting out from a FM-broadcast-based approach, the step to DAB-based and DVB-T-based operation has already been made. As a result, a fully mobile FM/DAB/DVB-T multi-band PR system is now available, offering maximum flexibility for measurement campaigns with air, ground and sea targets. Experiments with a great variety of third-party transmitters and arbitrary transmitter-target-receiver geometries have been conducted. The design considerations and the resulting PR system concept are described, and the results of representative measurement campaigns with different types of ground and aerial targets are presented.