A UAV Airborne Passive Digital Radar for Aerial Surveillance

Abstract

This paper presents a detailed overview of an experimental passive radar payload developed by ONERA the French Aerospace Lab., which improves the performances of VHF passive radar by using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) as support of the receiver. This article highlights the passive radar design which is based on techniques inspired from modern digital receivers combining front-end digitizer and FPGA-based real time data signal processing.