Experimental Results Investigating The Feasibility Of Gps Bistatic Radar For Target Detection And Estimation

A study has been undertaken to investigate the feasibility of using GPS signals to detect targets in a passive bistatic radar scenario. This application requires a high sensitivity receiver system as it is mainly challenged by the extremely weak power of the reflected GPS signals that make them difficult to detect. A preliminary experiment has been performed with a ground-based receiver that captured both the direct and reflected signals using separate collocated antennas. This experiment showed that a GPS-based bistatic radar system could detect a nearby moving target by using sufficiently long integration times. This experiment used a single antenna element and forms a baseline for predicting the performance of the more advanced systems using multiple antennas in an array. The position of the target could also be estimated using the time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) measurements between the direct and reflected signals.