Passive Localization for Frequency Hopping Signal Emitter Based on Synthetic Aperture Principle

Abstract

The frequency hopping (FH) signal has received much research interest due to its low interception probability. In the FH signal localization, the variation of signal frequency introduces error into localization methods involving phase or frequency information. In order to deal with the problem of positioning measurement estimation for unknown FH signal emitters, this article proposes a synthetic aperture passive positioning method. Baseband modulation of received signals is compensated by the time difference method. Then, the de-chirp method is introduced for carrier frequency estimation. The Doppler frequency of each pulse is compensated by a Doppler frequency compensation matrix, and the cost function related to the emitter position is constructed by 2-D focus results of the received signal at all frequencies. The emitter position is obtained through a gird search. Simulation and experimental data show that the proposed method is superior to several existing positioning methods especially when the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is low.