Ricerc@Sapienza

This paper investigates the target detection capability of a Passive Forward Scatter Radar (PFSR) exploiting a DVB-T transmitter as illuminator of opportunity. Specifically, it is shown that conventional processing schemes adopted in PFSR might suffer from significant performance degradation when dealing with OFDM waveforms of opportunity compared to the case of FM radio broadcast. In fact, a non-negligible increase of the disturbance background is observed in the final spectrogram, which yields an undesired masking effect on weak target echoes.

Suitable methods to jointly exploit the diversity of information conveyed by different polarimetric channels in Passive Coherent Location (PCL) systems are a topic of current research. Possible signal processing strategies were devised for FM radio based PCL with the purpose of enhancing the target detection capability and their benefits were largely demonstrated. This paper presents the results from a preliminary investigation carried out considering a multi-channel PCL system exploiting DVB-T signals.

This work presents an analysis of passive inverse synthetic aperture radar images obtained exploiting simultaneously digital video broadcasting-Terrestrial (DVB-T) and digital video broadcasting-satellite (DVB-S) as illuminators of opportunity (IOs) over a cooperative maritime target with known motion. The combined exploitation of these two IOs is extremely appealing for passive imaging purposes, given their complementary characteristics.