The passive radar is a hot research topic. A multi-channel wideband passive radar experimental system is designed and the digital television terrestrial broadcasting (DTTB) signal is chosen to carry out the target detection experiment of civil aviation aircraft. The polarization and spatial filtering methods are used to solve the strong direct path interference suppression problems brought by the receiving system location; combined with the characteristics of DTTB signal, the block length selection interval in the block batch processing method for range-Doppler images calculation is given; the clutter suppression performance is compared through the experimental data receiving from different bistatic polarization channels, the conclusion is different from the monostatic radar and it can guide the passive radar experiment.
Passive radar, using transmissions of opportunity, has the potential advantages of anti-stealth and anti-jamming. In the last twenty years, the passive radar, based on radio and television, communication, navigation, wireless local area network signal and so on, has been researched widely. Many passive radar experimental systems have been developed both at home and abroad, and the basic theory and key technology of passive coherent radar have been made a great progress [
The typical passive radar system includes the “silent sentry” radar system developed by Martin Lockheed, and the HA100 radar system developed by Thales, France. In recent years, the digital broadcasting system, such as DVB-T, is widely used in the world. It has the advantages of wide range and remote distance of signal coverage, easy to obtain and easy processing. So the passive radar based on digital broadcasting signals has attracted wide attention of scholars all over the world [
Many radiation signals can be used for passive radar and the frequency range is very wide as above mentioned. Especially, the signal characteristics and waveforms of each frequency point are quite different from each other, so the corresponding signal processing method should be different. On the other hand, a wideband passive radar receiving system can be adapted to different scenarios if the working frequency can be set freely and the signal processing software can be re-constructed. For this purpose, a multi-channel wideband passive radar receiving and processing system is designed, each channel can be controlled independently, and the corresponding frequency band signal is acquired by center frequency selection. The general passive radar signal processing software depends on the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and Central Processing Unit (CPU) combined architecture and is realized by modularization, so it has the ability of reconstruction. Finally, the DTTB signal is chosen to carry out the detection experiment of civil aviation aircraft based on this experimental system.
This experimental system is designed with 6 channels, one of which is used as a reference channel and the other channels are used to form a surveillance array. The frequency-modulated radio (FM) and television (TV) signals can be used for target detection. In order to simplify the installation of antenna, the uniform linear array is used, and the internal between each array element can be adjusted flexibly. Uniform linear array has a series of advantages, such as compact structure, accurate measurement, etc. But the grating lobe is its major drawback, and it cannot solve the ambiguity as the passive receiver. Therefore, the directional antenna is used, and the main lobe of the array should cover the entire field of view. Under this condition, the grating lobe can be ignored, and the specific parameters depend on the field size of view and signal frequency.
The schematic diagram of the receiving channel is shown in
In order to suppress the direct wave in target detection by pattern synthesis, the self-calibration of channels is needed to eliminate the inconsistency of amplitude and phase. For this system, because the direct wave is strong in the reference channel, the direct wave is divided into several signals with the same amplitude and phase and injected into each surveillance channel, and then the errors of amplitude and phase can be compensated according to the output signal. Therefore, the radio frequency switch should be used for switching between the receiving channel and the calibration channel. The receiving and processing system is shown in
The GPU and CPU are combined for passive radar signal processing, which implement the high speed parallel computing capability of the GPU card, and the real-time performance of the radar signal processing is realized [
In the application scenario, the signal of the transmitter should be intercepted firstly, and then the working frequency of the receiving system can be determined according to the parameters of the radiation source. Then, the antenna array geometry and beam forming algorithm should be determined according to the geometrical structure of the scene. The actual data processing can be carried out after above system parameters setting up. The basic data processing diagram is shown in
Compared with the FM radio, global system for mobile (GSM) and other signals, the transmitted power of DTTB signal is larger and the bandwidth is wider. Using the DTTB signal as the radiation source of the passive radar can achieve the longer detecting distance and higher range resolution, so it has been widely studied in several research institutions.
Firstly, the surrounding signal is analyzed by the spectrum analyzer and the corresponding DTTB signal frequency is found. The measured signal frequency spectrum is shown in
In the experiment, the distance of between the transmitter and the receiver is about 5 km, so the direct path interference is so strong that the reference channel is easy to be in saturation state. As well known that the DTTB signal is transmitted with the horizontal polarization, and it is found that there is 10 dB difference between the received signals by horizontal and vertical polarized antenna in the reference channel, so the vertical polarized antenna is used for reducing the direct path interference.
In order to improve the weak signal receiving ability, the gain of the receiver should be set as the maximum, and the synthesis of an adapted pattern with a null in the direction of the reference illuminator. What’s more, the fast block least mean square filter is used for further reduction of the direct path interference. This method has advantages of fast computation speed and fast convergence. The data of 0.4 s length is selected, and the adaptive filter iterative parameter is set as 0.006 and the filter length 512. The filter results of a test data is shown in
The reference [
which is calculated by inverse FFT and FFT with high computation speed.
The block length is an important parameter in the algorithm. It is restricted by many factors, which can cause target lost or false target if the block length is not set appropriately. The block length determined by the maximum bistatic range, the maximum unambiguous bistatic velocity and no range migration. Through induce and analysis, the block length should meet the following conditions.
where fs is the sampling frequency, lseg is block length of the reference signal, Lseg is block length of the surveillance signal, λ is the wave length, vmax is the maximum bistatic velocity, Rmax is the maximum bistatic range, c is the light speed.
In addition, because the frame head is stronger than the frame content in the DTTB signal, it can be found that the longer the block length, the less the Doppler ambiguity of the signal itself.
reference [
Two surveillance channels are connected with horizontal and polarized antennas respectively, which correspond to the bistatic horizontal-vertical (HV) and horizontal-horizontal (HH) polarization receiving channels, and they point to the same direction. And then, the reference signal is used for clutter suppression processing with both surveillance channels, and the cancelling gains achieve 24.4 dB and 24.2 dB, respectively.
The residual signals of the surveillance channels after clutter suppression processing are shown in
The range-Doppler images of the two channels are shown in
The target detection experiment of dual polarization passive radar is carried out by using the broadband multi-channel receiving and processing system and the results show the availability of the experiment system. The
strong direct wave suppression problem is solved by polarization and spatial filtering methods. The clutter suppression performances of different polarization channels are compared and the results show that the difference between the two channels is quite different. The further study should be on the measurement and statistical characteristics modeling of bistatic clutter and the target detection and identification of the dual-polarization passive radar.
This work is supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61401491).
Yonghu Zeng,Xiaofeng Ai,Liandong Wang,Xiaoyang Wang,Guangyong Zheng, (2016) Experimental Research of Dual-Polarization Passive Radar Based on DTTB Signal. Journal of Computer and Communications,04,101-107. doi: 10.4236/jcc.2016.43016