A high power commercial radio transmitter illuminates radar targets, which in this case are an aircraft and a meteor trail that happens to be oriented in a way that allows specular reflection to be seen by the receiver. All of this may sound like a lot of effort, but don’t worry, making a passive radar isn’t too complicated.Ī simple passive radar setup. I’ll also go through strategies to determine that everything is working as expected. In later postings I will go through more detailed block diagrams of the different parts of a passive radar system, provide example data, and give some Python scripts that can be used to perform passive radar signal processing. It will take a few posts to show how to build a radar capable of performing these types of measurements. Because this has been a topic that keeps attracting inquiries, I’m going to explain how I did the experiment in more detail. It was mainly intended as a zany little side story for our radio telescope blog, but it ended up raising a lot of interest. I wrote about this in a very brief blog posting a few years ago.

And get this, the radar system you’re going to build works by listening for existing transmissions that bounce off the targets being measured! Below is an animation of a measurement of airplanes and meteors I made using a radar system that I built with a few simple easily available pieces of hardware: two $8 RTL software defined radio dongles that I bought on eBay, and two log-periodic antennas.

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