Preliminary results of detection utilizing DVB-S2 based polarimetric passive radar

Digital Video Broadcasting satellites (DVB-S and DVB-S2) present a high potential for passive radar due to their continuous illumination, transmission bandwidth and geo-stationary orbit. Their viability as an Illumination source for passive coherent location is already confirmed in the radar literature. In this paper, the use of polarimetry diversity in the surveillance channel of a DVB-S2 based passive radar is proposed to improve the detection performances of a single polarization DVB-S2 based passive radar. The designed signal processing scheme considers the combination of one single polarization reference channel and dual-linear polarization surveillance ones exploiting the depolarization effects on the target's scattered signal. A measurement campaign was carried out to analyse the advantage of the proposed processing scheme exploiting polarimetry diversity in the surveillance acquisition channel. The satellite version of the passive radar demonstrator IDEPAR from the University of Alcala was adapted to allow the acquisition of two linear polarizations in the surveillance channels. The radar demonstrator was deployed in a semi-urban scenario where a cooperative vehicle with a GPS recorder was used as a cooperative target for validation purposes. The detection outputs concerning the use of polarimetry based radar processing were compared with the single polarization case. Results show an improvement in the detector performance when polarimetry diversity is applied. The proposed processing approach reduced the false alarm rate by 2 orders of magnitude while slightly increasing the detection probability in comparison with the best case of single polarization radar processing.