Nondesired Effects in DVB-T Based Passive Radar Due to Sporadic Interference

This paper tackles the study of the nondesired effects in the detection capabilities and system resolution of Passive Radar (PR) solutions due to sporadic interference. Real radar data acquired by IDEPAR demonstrator (DVB-T based PR system developed by the University of Alcala) with the presence of an interference were considered. The ambiguity function is calculated to estimate the pedestal mean level and the equivalent information bandwidth. A degradation of the range resolution and a reduction of the Signal-to-Noise Ratio are observed. A simulated radar scenario was designed using the acquired data and adding terrestrial targets to obtain a good approximation of a real environment. Although the resulted detection capabilities are reduced, the target trajectories can be identified. This trend can be explained based on the power migration along range dimension associated with the interference bandwidth, generating blind Doppler shifts in the detection stage. Then, these nondesired effects should be taking into account to improve the PR availability against sporadic interferences.