Design, implementation and test of a multiband multistatic passive radar system for operational use in airspace surveillance

Passive Radar systems use the target illumination by third-party transmitters, e.g. FM radio or terrestrial TV broadcast stations, for target detection and localisation. Due to the great number and wide frequency spacing of the different broadcast services, the resulting multistatic and multiband illumination of air targets can be used to generate a wide-area air picture and to achieve a sound tracking performance even for small and low-altitude air targets. However, to facilitate the operational use of Passive Radar e.g. as primary or complementary sensor within air surveillance or air traffic management systems, the performance and maturity levels of Passive Radar sensors have to be further increased. Thereby, the performance of active air surveillance radars can be considered a as benchmark. To close the gap to operational employment, a combined FM/ DAB/DVB Passive Radar system was developed. Extensive test campaigns have lead to numerous improvements to the signal processing algorithms, to the diversity approach and to the accuracy of the model-based performance prediction toolset. This paper summarizes the results and the experience obtained during this effort.