SABER-TDA: Passive coherent location of aircraft using XM-Radio and a small ground station

This paper reports on early observation results from the S-band Array for Bistatic Electromagnetic Ranging Technology Demonstrator Array. This system is a demonstration platform for a passive ground-based primary radar station for monitoring aircraft. This station is unique in that it utilizes existing satellite-based radio signals as transmitters rather than terrestrial signals. Using algorithms that enable long integration times, this system might provide accurate position and velocity measurements at ranges of tens of nautical miles from the ground station for most targets, and up to 100 nautical miles for larger targets. In these measurements, XM-Radio was used as the illuminator and the SABER-TDA station as the receiver. Different types of aircraft were observed in different scattering geometries. Comparison with truth data is in progress.