Lossy compression of voltage level samples before detection in distributed passive bistatic radar systems

Distributed passive radars confront the high dynamic range challenge by splitting the receiver physically to provide high SNR samples of the transmitter as well as reduced cochannel interference. The receivers are mutually coherent and must therefore exchange voltage level data for computation of the cross-ambiguity function. The data bandwidth required for fullprecision (16 bit) data is about 2 Mbps to support for a single channel. This data bandwidth demand can stress the cost and latency of distributed passive radars. Therefore we investigate the effect the sensitivity of a passive radar system using several methods to compress the voltage level samples prior.