Design and development of a signal and data processor test bed for a passive radar in the FM band

This paper describes the design and development of the signal and data processing chain required by a Passive Covert Radar (PCR) exploiting a single non co-operative frequency modulated (FM) commercial radio station as its transmitter of opportunity. The processing chain is proved to: 1) efficiently remove interference and clutter from the received signal, 2) detect targets and extract their bistatic range, bistatic Doppler and azimuth, 3) track targets in the Cartesian domain via the use of particle filtering. The whole processing sequence has been tested using emulated FM radio signals and scenarios as an input to receiving channels. Detection and tracking performance of the passive radar have been assessed comparing the performance of the signal and data processor test bed to the truth data feeding the test bed itself.