Multichannel SDR Platforms for Mobile PCL Applications

This article presents a brief overview of hardware platforms with multiple RF input channels that can be employed in the area of passive coherent location (PCL) and passive synthetic aperture radar. Two families of the platforms are considered, i.e., field-programmable gate array based development boards and general-purpose software-defined radio receivers. Practical solutions that have been validated in field experiments are described: a high-performance four-channel platform and its lightweight version that perfectly suits the needs of low-power moving installations. The preliminary results of target detections are presented, which are obtained from the signals acquired with the lightweight PCL platform. Our results prove that, besides its simplicity, the small and low-power platform can be successfully used in PCL applications that use digital audio broadcasting transmitters as the source of illumination.