"BRENDA" bistatic radar equipment & data acquisition (a Barcelona bistatic radar experiment)

This paper presents one of the first complete bistatic radar experiments by using a hitchhiking technique. The experiment involves the design of a low cost radar receiver that performs a bistatic radar pair with Barcelona´s airport primary surveillance radar. This radar works as the transmitter subsystem, whereas the receiver subsystem is located at Barcelona´s Telecommunication Engineers School, giving a baseline (distance between both subsystems) of 11 Km (Figure 1). The design and characterization of the RF front end, the synchronization system that allows to recover the staggered sequence pulse repetition frequency, and the radar measurements obtained with this bistatic system form also part of this work. The obtained results show that this kind of system is capable of increasing the robustness and performance of monostatic primary surveillance radars with a low additional cost.