An L-band Bistatic Radar: Experimental System and Measurement Campaign

In this paper, the first results of a measurement campaign with an L-band bistatic radar system are presented. The measurement campaign was conducted in autumn of 2023 near Linköping in the south of Sweden and included one airborne target. The radar system consisted of two subsystems, one TX node with a horn antenna and one RX node using a wideband 2D receive array with dual polarization elements. The separation between TX and RX nodes was about 10 km and results are reported with detections of bistatic ranges up to 50 km. We give an overview of the system and report on the initial tests to verify functionality of the system for air target detection. Furthermore, we address different practical signal processing aspects related to the measurement campaign. This includes waveform selection, motion compensation and array signal processing for target SNR improvement and suppression of interference from communication signals.