Compound Preselector for Multistatic Passive Radar Employed in Remote Sensing Applications

Abstract

Passive radars and multistatic passive radars in particular are gaining increasing attention. It is due to their effectiveness in detecting, tracking and identifying targets. Multistatic passive radars are used in remote sensing observations of the Earth’s ionosphere, meteors, space junk, etc. Another application is the detection and tracking of manmade objects and vehicles in the atmosphere or on the surface of the Earth. The current paper discusses a hardware design approach applicable to the front-end of a multistatic passive radar receiver, namely a compound preselector. The preselector is a very important part of the radio receiver in cases where there are strong neighbouring signals in the radio band of operation. Such strong signals may overload the receiver or the low noise preamplifier and render the whole system dysfunctional. This article elaborates on a two-component preselector having very high rejection ratio to nearby emitters, still keeping the receiver simple and reliable. The authors have registered several utility models on innovations in multistatic passive radars at Patent Office of Republic of Bulgaria.