ISAR imaging of an aircraft target USING ISDB-T digital TV based passive bistatic radar

Passive bistatic radars (PBRs) exploit existing transmitters such as TV broadcasts as the source of illumination. PBR is consisted of two receivers, with one antenna pointed at the source and the other at the target, and the target range is determined by correlating the signal scattered by the target with the signal directly arrived at the receiver. Since PBR does not transmit any waveform, it consumes lower power, and no frequency allocation is required. We have conducted a field experiment exploiting terrestrial digital TV broadcast to assess the feasibility of ISAR (Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar) observation based on PBR. The wide and flat spectrum of the OFDM signal and the small gap between the channels enables us to obtain high range resolution of up to several meters by exploiting multiple physical channels. Therefore, moderate resolution ISAR imaging is expected to be possible. In this paper, PBR based ISAR algorithm is briefly explained, and the first example of observed PBR based ISAR image of an aircraft target is shown.