Implementation of a Low-cost Passive Bistatic Radar

Download or read book Implementation of a Low-cost Passive Bistatic Radar written by Joshua Leigh Sendall and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Passive radar detects and ranges targets by receiving signals which are reflected off targets. Communication transmissions are generally used, however, theoretically any signal with a suitable ambiguity function may be used. The exploitation of an existing transmitter and the removal of emissions allow passive radars to act as a complementary sensor which is useful in environments where conventional active radar is not well suited. Such environments are in covert operations and in situations where a low cost or spectrally efficient solution is required. Most developed passive radars employ intensive signal processing and use application specific equipment to achieve detection. The high-end processors and receiver equipment, however, detract from some of the inherent advantages in the passive radar architecture. These include the lower cost and power requirements achieved by removing transmitter hardware. This study investigates the challenges faced when removing application-specific and high end components from the system and replacing them with low-cost alternatives. Solutions to these challenges are presented and validated by designing and evaluating a radar using these principles. It was found that the major limitation in passive radar is the dynamic range of the receiver. While processing the signals was, and is, a significant challenge, be implemented on a low-cost, low-power embedded processor. This was achieved by asserting a few limitations to the configuration, exploiting the subsequently generated redundancy, and taking advantage of the parallelism by using general purpose graphics processing.. Even on this processor, the system was able to run in real time and able to detect targets up to 91 km (bistatic range of 195 km) from the radar.