Experimental Study of Aircraft Detection by PBR Exploiting Uncooperative Radar as Illuminator

Abstract

Common successful trials on Passive Bi-static Radar (PBR) exploit civil communication signals as opportunity illuminators. In this paper, we consider a passive radar system utilizing uncooperative radar as illuminator to detect the aircraft. Specifically, the illuminator radar is frequency agile and PRI agile. And we propose a whole compatible signal processing scheme for this system. A field experiment is done to validate the feasibility of this system. For the convenience of evaluation, we choose several real-time civil airlines as the operating objects. Resorting to the automatic dependent surveillance (ADS-B) database and the active radar’s detection results, the correction and precision of the aircraft detection results can be verified.