S.V. Bessonov1, I.V. Donets2, V.S. Onishchenko3, Ya.A. Reizenkind4, A.M. Lerer5, V.N. Shevchenko6

1−6 JSC «All-Russian Scientific Research Institute «Gradient» (Rostov-on-Don, Russia)

2,4,5 Southern Federal University (Rostov-on-Don, Russia)

1 rostov@gradient-rnd.ru, 2 igor_don2002@mail.ru, 3 vsonish@yandex.ru, 4 jar@sfedu.ru, 5 lerer@sfedu.ru 

The article reviews the current state of passive radar in general and in the FM broadcasting range in particular. It is noted that passive radiolocation is a direction in radiolocation, which is intensively developing in the last two decades. The concept itself includes radar with transmitters that were not originally intended for this purpose, but are radio transmitters of various radio systems, including communication systems. In particular, the use of transmitters of digital television and radio, as well as transmitters broadcasting in the FM broadcasting range is promising. Thus passive radar works with the transmitter, which is not a part of it. The latter circumstance provides an energetically favourable mode of operation of the passive locator. The absence of its own radiation makes the mode of operation of the passive locator particularly stealthy, which ensures its survivability in countermeasures.

But operating on signals and illumination transmitters not designed for radiolocation adds to the difficulty. The main difficulty in comparison with a conventional locator is the mode of operation with continuous emission of the transmitter. As a result, the direct illumination signal is a powerful coherent noise, against which it is necessary to detect weak reflected signals from targets. Traditionally, this problem is solved by generating a surface (radar image) in coordinates Doppler frequency shift - delay. The article compares several methods of generating this surface on the basis of data obtained experimentally with a circular two-tier antenna array.

The traditional method related to the compensation of the direct illumination signal was compared with the variational methods developed by the authors. It is concluded that the variation methods are more sensitive. Different modifications of variational methods have different acceleration in computation time and approach in speed to the traditional method based on the use of the two-dimensional mutual correlation function. As a result, a moving aircraft object was detected with high probability at a distance of 24 km from the locator in the signal of FM radio station illumination located in the urban area. In the future it is planned to attract additional information about aircrafts to estimate the detection range provided by the developed algorithms.

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