A passive bistatic radar experiment for very low radar cross-section target detection

Abstract

Conventional mono-static defense radars have difficulty detecting low radar cross-section (L-RCS) targets, specifically small unmanned air vehicles (UAV) due to their radar cross-section and flight altitude. Passive bi-static radar (PBR) systems promise to improve the coverage of conventional surveillance radars by detecting and tracking the L-RCS targets. So far there are no experimental results in the literature for the detection of small UAVs using PBR. This paper presents for the first time the results of field trials for detecting a small UAV (average RCS) using a software defined multi-band multi-beam passive radar. Due to remoteness of the area of experiment the GSM signal of opportunity was generated using an own transmitter. The power of transmit signal was kept to 23dBm to have a realistic scenario.