Design and Evaluation of a Low-Cost Passive Radar Receiver Based on IoT Hardware

Recent years saw an increase in computation power on Internet of things devices such as the Raspberry Pi. It is now common for such platforms to boast multiple CPU-cores with clock rates of 1 gigahertz and higher. We have taken this evolution as a motivator to see how far we can push the limit in performing complex operations on a large amount of data by implementing a passive radar system on the Raspberry Pi. To keep the costs of our system further down, we evaluated the use of low-cost RTL-SDR receivers. Our work shows that today's IoT devices allow real-time processing for passive radar applications for both, FM and DAB signals. With our low-cost receiver, we were able to receive echos of aircraft several kilometers away.