No abstract

Passive coherent location (PCL) radars employ noncooperative transmitters for target detection. The major issues for the PCL radars are the noise presence in the reference signal and the static clutter contribution in the surveillance signal. This paper examines the static clutter suppression methods for the DVB-T based PCL radars. Precisely, it evaluates the impact of the reference signal noise on the existing static clutter suppression methods and it proposes an improved method. Real-data results are employed to demonstrate the proposed method and its efficiency.

The present work investigates the reference signal reconstruction method for passive coherent location (PCL) radars exploiting Digital Video Broadcasting-Terrestrial (DVB-T) signals. The reference signal reconstruction improves the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the reference signal, which enhances the detection probability for DVB-T based PCL systems. The existing approach for the reference signal reconstruction is performed by demodulating the received reference signal to retrieve the transmitted quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) symbols and modulate them to obtain the reconstructed signal. For low SNR values, the QAM symbol detection is accompanied with a significant error, which leads to a mismatch between the reconstrued signal and the exact one. Consequently, the expected improvement due to the signal reconstruction is limited. In this work, we propose an optimum reconstruction method which filters the detected QAM symbol prior to the remodulation step. To validate the proposed method, we retrieved analytic expressions for the detection and false-alarm probabilities and verified them through Monte-Carlo simulations. In addition, real-data sets were used to evaluate the proposed method performances. The results show that the proposed method outperforms the conventional one by extending the feasibility of the reference signal reconstruction for low SNR values.

The DVB-T signals are an attractive source of illumination for the passive radars due to their wide bandwidth and signal structure. The DVB-T standard permits the reconstruction of the received reference signal to enhance its signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The signal reconstruction possibility allows the use of a simplified configuration of the radar by employing a single receiver. In this paper, we propose an optimized processing scheme for the single receiver DVB-T passive radar. We carry out Monte-Carlo simulations to assess the performances of the single receiver configuration, and we present real-data results to validate the proposed scheme.