Planning and design phases of a commensal radar system in the FM broadcast band

Abstract

We refer to radars that depend on transmitters of opportunity while having no impact on the systems that the transmitters are serving, as commensal radars. Other researchers refer to such systems as passive bistatic radar (PBR) [5], [26], [18]. The word passive refers only to the receivers; since, no radar system can be passive. Our system is multistatic, so the term PBR is not appropriate. Another term used in open literature is, passive coherent location [5], [23], [9]. This nomenclature is closer to our system, except that the system is not passive, so we believe that commensal is the best descriptor of this class of radar, while ours is specifically, a multistatic FM broadcast band commensal radar. An overview of a multistatic system is shown in Figure 1. For simplicity, we shall refer to commensal multistatic radar (CMR) when referring to our system here. We will explain in the following why our system must be multistatic, with few transmitter sites and many receivers, due to its intended deployment in developing nations.