Protection of Critical Infrastructure using LTE450-based Passive Radar: Range Measurements for Drone Detection

Considering the massively increasing importance of drones in actual military conflicts or potential terrorist attacks in conjunction with the vulnerability of critical infrastructure against these kinds of threats, early drone detection is a key issue and particularly challenging for non-emitting drones. In Germany and other European countries a blackout resistant LTE network in the 450 MHz band for critical infrastructure sites is currently rolled outed or already planned. The basestation transmitters are presumably well suited as illuminators in a passive radar setup for drone detection.In this contribution we present experimental results for range measurements with a LTE450-based passive radar for drone detection. An experimental comparison of horizontal versus vertical polarization of the reception antenna as well as different direct path cancellation algorithms is included.