Benefits of passive radar

1. Pricethe receivers use passive components, usually COTS components, which are
cheaper. Operations and maintenance costs are also lower due to the lack of
transmitter and any moving parts
2. The opponent being detected is unaware of being scanned.
3. Passive radar use a third party's transmitter(s) and hence is cheaper and more reliable
to run
4. Passive radar systems detect targets continuously, typically once a second.
5. Passive radar systems detect stealth aircraft better than active radar systems.
6. Passive radar systems cannot be detected when in operation, since they have no active
transmitter as an element of the system.
7. Passive radar can detect targets over a wide area, whose radius is often measured in
hundreds of kilometers.
8. Passive radar systems are relatively inexpensive, requiring nothing more than a digital
receiver system, stable oscillators and an adequate signal processing capability.
9. No frequency allocation is required and nor is the system a target of environmental
health protestors, allowing deployment in areas where normal radars cannot be
deployed
10. Passive radars are typically physically small and hence easily deployed


Passive radar systems can be ground-based and fixed, or deployed on mobile platforms
including submarines, ships and aircraft.
Research on passive radar systems is of growing interest throughout the world, with various
open source publications showing active research and development in the United States
(including work at the Air Force Research Labs, Lockheed-Martin Mission Systems,
Raytheon, University of Washington, Georgia Tech and the University of Illinois), in the
NATO C3 Agency in The Netherlands, in the United Kingdom (at Roke Manor Research,
QinetiQ, University of Birmingham, University College London and BAE Systems), France
(including the government labs of ONERA), Germany (including the labs at FGAN-FHR).
There is also active research on this technology in several laboratories in China and Russia.
The low cost nature of the system make the technology particularly attractive to University
Labs and other agencies with limited budgets, as the key requirements are less hardware and
more algorithmic sophistication.
Much current research is currently focussing on the exploitation of modern digital broadcast
signals. The US HDTV standard is particularly good for passive radar, having an excellent
ambiguity function and very high power transmitters. The DVB-T digital TV standard (and
related DAB digital audio standard) used through most of the rest of the world is more
challengingtransmitter powers are lower, and many networks are set up in a "single
frequency network" mode, in which all transmitters are synchronised in time and frequency.
Without careful processing, the net result for a passive radar is like multiple repeater
jammers!
A recording of the 2004 Watson-Watt Lecture at the UK Institution of Electrical Engineers
(IEE) can be viewed at the IEE website, which was on the subject of "Passive Covert Radar:
Watson-Watt's Daventry Experiment Revisited". This includes a summary of the work in this
field since World War II. To view the lecture navigate to here and then launch the iee.tv
player. Use the search field of the player with the term "Watson Watt" to locate the lecture.