DVB-T passive radar for vehicles detection in urban environment

Passive radar systems exploit non-cooperative transmitter to detect targets in areas of interest. Some of the main advantages of such systems with respect to conventional radars include low cost architectures, low energy requirements and potentially null probability of intercept. In this paper a low-cost solution for vehicles detection making use of passive radar concept is presented. A Software Defined Radio (SDR) solution and commercial antennas have been used to realize a DVB-T passive radar demonstrator. An analysis of the DVB-T signal is firstly presented together with a study of its capability as radar waveform. Afterwards an experimental setup is presented and analysed and finally some results of targets detection are shown.