A multi-band multi-beam software-defined passive radar part I: System design

This paper presents the design and development of a software-defined passive bistatic radar system that can operate at any carrier frequency, bandwidth and signals over a large frequency spectrum up to 6 GHz with transmitters-of-opportunity at spatially-diverse locations. An inexpensive open-source software-defined-radio technology is used to develop a fully-synchronized multi-channel digital receiver system. A number of phased array antennas with different configurations are built to cover a wide frequency spectrum and polarizations. Digital beamforming, adaptive filtering and digital signal processing techniques are employed for target detection and tracking in all directions. Measurement results are given at the end to validate the design.