Passive Forward-Scattering Radar Using Digital Video Broadcasting Satellite Signal for Drone Detection

This paper presents a passive radar system using a signal of opportunity from Digital Video Broadcasting Satellite (DVB-S). The ultimate purpose of the system is to be used as an air traffic monitoring and surveillance system. However, the work focuses on drone detection as a proof of the concept. Detecting a drone by using satellite-based passive radar possess inherent challenges, such as the small radar cross section and low speed. Therefore, this paper proposes a unique method by leveraging the advantage of forward-scattering radar (FSR) topology and characteristics to detect a drone; in other words, the system is known as a passive FSR (p-FSR) system. In the signal-processing algorithm, the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) is applied to the received signal to extract the unique feature vector of the micro-Doppler frequency from the drone’s rotating blades. The paper highlights the p-FSR experimental setup and experiment campaign to detect drones. The experimental results show the feasibility of the p-FSR using a signal transmitted from a satellite to detect flying drone crossing the forward-scatter baseline between the satellite and ground station.