Challenges and first results of an airborne passive SAR experiment using a DVB-T transmitter

This paper evaluates passive synthetic aperture radar (SAR) using a non-cooperative transmitter of opportunity (DVB-T) and an airborne receiver. Multiple experiments during a measurement campaign in summer 2017 have been conducted to collect data of different bistatic geometries. It has become evident that airborne DVB-T receivers are more affected by co-channel interference (CCI) generated by transmitters at larger distances in contrast to ground-based systems. This leads to a wideband noise jamming, which makes it difficult to reconstruct accurately the reference signal. Therefore, a suppression of the CCI is essential to significantly improve the resulting image. Beside a description of the experiments and the general processing steps, the impact of a CCI suppression approach on the focused image is shown.