Simultaneous passive SAR imaging and detection of airborne targets

Thomas Sjögren; Per-Olov Frölind; Rolf Ragnarsson; A. Haglund; Anders Gustavsson; Lars Ulander; Viet Vu; Mats I. Pettersson

Simultaneous passive SAR imaging and detection of airborne targets
Paper in proceeding, 2017

Passive radar has been given much attention for many years. It has several advantages in comparison to active radar, such as possibility of lower cost sensors, ability to operate without disturbing the environment as well as allowing the radar covert operation. As such, passive radar exploits signals of opportunity e.g. FM radio and DVB-T. Ground based passive radars is well proved and is usually for simplicity on a stationary platform, using an array of antennas and a dedicated antenna for reference channel. Most commonly these radars aim at detecting airborne objects. However, recently results have been presented with passive radar on airborne platforms, in which synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images using DVB-T signals has been performed. Only limited research results are published on the topic of air to air passive radar and even less in combination with SAR. In this paper, we present a method that combines passive SAR with airborne moving target detection.

DVB-T

airborne radar

synthetic aperture radar

passive radar