Aircraft detection experimental results for GPS bistatic radar using phased-array receiver

Abstract

Since the transmission power level of Global Positioning System (GPS) signal is weak, a passive bistatic radar that utilises GPS satellites as the illuminator of opportunity is only feasible for detecting large size targets such as aircrafts, assuming that the system utilises high sensitivity, large scale receiver antenna arrays and uses integration periods of sufficient length. A phased-array receiver that consists of 32 antenna elements is developed for the radar system to enhance the detection performance and search for aircraft reflections across all directions-of-arrival using conventional beamforming technique. An initial experiment was previously done to investigate techniques such as array orientation and channel phase calibration using GPS signals as the calibrating sources, and also direct path and multipath interference mitigation using Wiener filters. This paper reports on further experiments conducted to study the feasibility of using GPS signals for aircraft detection.