Airborne Parasitic Bistatic Radar System

Black River Systems Co., Inc. proposes to develop an airborne PC-based passive surveillance radar system that utilizes non-cooperative radar transmissions to generate a bistatic radar picture. This “software radar” implementation will provide maximum flexibility, while minimizing hardware size, weight and power (SWaP) and cost for future applications. We will design the airborne PC-based passive surveillance system by leveraging existing designs as starting points. The designed passive surveillance system will accept two IF feeds from available host platform antenna/RF receiver assets, digitize the IF signals and provide digital signal/data processing of the radar data. Since the final Airborne Parasitic Bistatic Radar (APBR) processing system will, most likely, be used on existing platforms with existing antennas and front-end RF processing, the APBR will be designed to input data at the IF level, thus making it applicable to a wide variety of host applications. The development process includes requirements allocation, analyses and tradeoffs of implementation parameters, hardware/software implementation and system test. Operator input and a laptop display will be provided. Airborne data collection experiments will provide test data for laboratory performance validation. A PC-based passive surveillance system will be provided at the completion of the effort.