Experimental validation of beamforming techniques for localization of moving target in passive radar

We investigate the performance of a Bucci based beamformer design and MUSIC algorithm under a passive radar setup using experimental measurements. A uniformly spaced linearly array of 11 discone antennas was used for the passive radar. The experiment was performed by exploiting the DVB-T broadcasting station as the illuminator of opportunity. In order to suppress the direct reference signal and clutters, the beamforming and MUSIC algorithms have been applied to the range-Doppler processed data; however, challenges remain due to very low SNR. This work proposes spatial smoothing based Bucci algorithm whose angle of arrival estimation performance is comparable to that of the MUSIC algorithm, however, this method does not need the computationally expensive singular value decomposition.