Ricerc@Sapienza

An important field of application of Forward Scatter Radar systems (both single-node and multi-node) consists in the estimation of the target kinematic parameters. In the past different studies have shown the possibility to extract these parameters by estimating the main target signal parameters (i.e. Doppler rate, derivative of the Doppler rate) and the time instant at which the target crosses the baseline. The estimation accuracy of the motion parameters depends on the estimation accuracy of the target signal parameters and on the FSR geometry.

Distributed inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) exploits the data acquired by multiple radar sensors carried by multiple platforms working in formation to increase the cross range resolution with respect to the value achievable by single platform systems. In this frame, the paper addresses the problem of the estimation of the ship dynamics, i.e., yaw, pitch, and roll rotation motions, exploiting the signals collected by such multiplatform radar imaging systems providing angular diversity in order to enable the focusing of the distributed ISAR images.

The focus of this paper is on the detection of airborne targets and on the estimation of their velocity by means of passive forward scatter radar systems based on the DVB-S as transmitter of opportunity. Results related to an experimental campaign carried out near “Leonardo Da Vinci” airport (Rome, Italy) are shown. Particularly the Doppler signature spectrogram is analyzed for a single node FSR configuration and time delay techniques are analyzed for a multi-static configuration suitable for velocity estimation.