Abstract
Recent technological advances enable a new class of passive radar instruments. These radars have no dedicated transmitter, observing serendipitous scatter of existing sources. Such radars may have very high performance and cost far less than conventional radars. The resulting equipment is essentially reduced to simple antennas, desktop computers, and Global Positioning System equipment. The safety hazards, interference problems, licensing issues, and financial costs associated with high-power transmitters are conspicuously absent. We will offer general design considerations and describe our own instrument, which observes the scatter of commercial FM broadcasts. Our system provides far better range and Doppler resolution than any conventional radar used in ionospheric coherent scatter studies, and is completely free of any range or Doppler aliasing problems. There are two principal drawbacks to passive radars: the “front end” signal processing cost is very large, and there is a significant data transport problem. However, spectacular advances in low-cost computing and internet bandwidth have rendered these problems quite easy to solve.
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