A Do It Yourself Mobile Communications Signal Based Passive Radar

Passive radar systems have received a renewed interest in the last decade or so due to its numerous advantages and the technological advancements that rendered the receiver design a rather easy task. This paper aims to give the recipe for a repeatable low cost UMTS based passive radar system composed of all commercially of the shelf (COTS) equipment and demonstrate its use for detecting ground targets on the field. We realize that this is not the first attempt to develop a passive radar system based on mobile signals, nor it is the first one to employ COTS equipment, however, unlike previous reports this aspires to give a step- by-step description of the hardware and algorithm design of the radar system that would enable other researchers to build their own which yields it of great practical value.