Passive radar

Passive radar systems (also referred to as passive coherent location and passive covert radar) encompass a class of radar systems that detect and track objects by processing reflections from non-cooperative sources of illumination in the environment, such as commercial broadcast and communications signals. It is a specific case of bistatic radar, the latter also including the exploitation of cooperative and non-cooperative radar transmitters.

Introduction

Conventional radar systems comprise a collocated transmitter and receiver, which usually share a common antenna to transmit and receive. A pulsed signal is transmitted and the time taken for the pulse to travel to the object and back allows the range of the object to be determined.

In a passive radar system, there is no dedicated transmitter. Instead, the receiver uses third-party transmitters in the environment, and measures the time difference of arrival between the signal arriving directly from the transmitter and the signal arriving via reflection from the object. This allows the bistatic range of the object to be determined. In addition to bistatic range, a passive radar will typically also measure the bistatic Doppler shift of the echo and also its direction of arrival. These allow the location, heading and speed of the object to be calculated. In some cases, multiple transmitters and/or receivers can be employed to make several independent measurements of bistatic range, Doppler and bearing and hence significantly improve the final track accuracy.