VHF cross-range profiling of aerial targets via passive ISAR: Preliminary experimental results

In this paper we investigate the possibility of obtaining cross-range profiles of real aerial targets by exploiting FM transmitters as illuminators of opportunity and by applying Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR) techniques against the collected passive radar echoes. To this purpose a suitable processing scheme has been developed to successfully exploit the very long Coherent Processing Interval (CPI) required to attain a reasonable cross-range resolution. The results are shown against real data set collected by an experimental setup developed and fielded at DIET Dept. of the University of Rome 'Sapienza'. This allows to preliminary demonstrate advanced potentialities of a FM-based PBR in aerial targets surveillance applications. © 2015 German Institute of Navigation (DGON).