Experimental results for a passive forward scatter radar based on OFDM waveforms of opportunity

Recently, it has been demonstrated that OFDM waveforms of opportunity have a non-negligible impact on the performance of a passive forward scatter radar (PFSR) when employing conventional processing schemes. Therefore, ad-hoc signal processing techniques have been proposed for improving both the interference cancellation stage and the target signature extraction in OFDM-based PFSR. This paper reports on the performance obtained with the resulting PFSR sensor in dedicated experimental tests. To this purpose a Digital Video Broadcasting - Terrestrial transmitter is employed as illuminator of opportunity and the detection capability of a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) based receiver is investigated against aerial targets. The results demonstrate the benefits of the proposed approach in a real-world scenario.