A portable many-element coherent receiver system for passive radar and space domain awareness

We describe a portable 32-antenna coherent passive radar system. The system was developed with space domain awareness in mind, but can be used for aircraft and nearer objects. We describe the physical and signal processing architecture and the results of a system test using VHF-band broadcast transmitters as illuminators. Using a combination of phased-array beamforming and delay/Doppler tracking, the flight path of a small training aircraft was tracked with high accuracy in excellent agreement with public flightpath data.