Countering illegal UAV flights : passive DVB radar potentiality

Since a few years, illegal UAV(Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) flights have been observed in different countries and under various environments[1]. Following these malicious fligths, most of the countries decided to counter such illegal activities asking their main industrial and laboratories to provide an already existing global solution against such UAV activities. However, it seems that up to now, none active system has been validated as the universal ideal solution. This paper will analyse the main system requirements. Then the potential of a passive DVB-T (Digital Video Broadcasting- Terrestrial) component will be illustrated using experimental data for both the detection, identification, location and alert functions:•The expected benefits of such a passive DVB-T solution will be analysed by considering experimental results on multi-rotors UAV as well as on fixed wings UAV.•Furthermore, some limitations of such a passive countering UAV component/system will be outlined.In summary, the passive DVB-T component offers very attractive capabilities for struggling against UAV at ranges up to three kilometres and even more in terms of detection, identification, location and alert.The interest of passive component for struggling against UAV is quite new [2] and it has to be noticed that several papers were dedicated to such an application during the last Passive Coherent Location Meeting in Bonn Wachtberg in 2017[3][4][5].