As outlined in Chapter 1, passive bistatic radars (PBRs) are a subset of bistatic radars that exploit nonradar transmitters of opportunity as their sources of radar illumination. They are often designed for military or civil air surveillance. When more than one transmitter is simultaneously exploited, the configuration becomes multistatic. In this case, measurements from transmit-receive pairs with overlapping coverage can be combined to locate a target usually via multilateration, for example, by determining the intersection of isorange contours generated by each pair. One transmitter operating with multiple receivers is also multistatic and can be used for multilateration. This chapter documents PBRs that have been proposed, designed, tested, and evaluated for military and civil air surveillance, starting with a PBR review in Section 6.2. It then assesses their utility in Section 6.3, specifically when compared to the entrenched, 70-year benchmark: monostatic radars. In subsequent sections, it documents the theory and available data to predict and assess the performance of a PBR, and then does so for a generic set of PBRs.

Chapter Contents:

• 6.1 Introduction
• 6.2 PBR Review
• 6.3 Military Utility
• 6.4 Waveforms and Interference
• 6.5 Range Performance
• 6.6 Target Location
• 6.7 Electronic Countermeasures
• Appendix 6-A: A Review of UHF/VHF Monostatic and Bistatic Radar Cross-Section Data
• Appendix 6-B: List of Symbols
• References

Inspec keywords: search radar; passive radar

Other keywords: civil air surveillance; monostatic radars; PBR; passive bistatic radars; bistatic radars; transmit-receive pair measurements; nonradar transmitters; military air surveillance; radar illumination; isorange contour intersection; air surveillance

Subjects: Radar equipment, systems and applications