DAB Signal Preprocessing for Passive Coherent Location

Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB) transmitters can be successfully used as illumination sources in Passive Coherent Location (PCL). However, extending the integration time in such a configuration leads to the occurrence of periodical artifacts in the bistatic range/Doppler plots, resulting from the time structure of the DAB signal. In this paper, we propose some methods of signal preprocessing (based on symbol removal, substitution by noise, and duplication) that operate on the DAB transmission frame level and improve the received signal’s correlation properties. We also demonstrate that two of these methods allow us to avoid the mentioned artifacts and thus to improve the quality of the range/Doppler plots with detection results. We evaluate the performance of the proposed methods using real DAB signals acquired in an experimental PCL platform. We also provide the analysis of the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) during the detection of a moving target which shows that the proposed solution, based on symbol duplication, can offer around 3 dB of gain in SNR. Finally, we carry out the computational complexity analysis showing that the proposed method can be implemented with a minimal cost after some optimizations.