Passive Radar, the modern choice for territory monitoring

In times of conflict my mind dwells on military technology and how it might play its part in the east. The current dispute of land rights of islands has utilized Drones and radar systems which would be in itself an act of aggression. The traditional form of Radar, which uses a transmitter and receiver station can easily be identified also Jammed. If electromagnetic waves traveling through one material meet another, having a very different dielectric constant or diamagnetic constant from the first, the waves will reflect or scatter from the boundary between the materials.
This means that a solid object in air or in a vacuum, or a significant change in atomic density between the object and what is surrounding it, will usually scatter radar (radio) waves from its surface. This is particularly true for electrically conductive materials such as metal and carbon fiber, making radar well-suited to the detection of aircraft and ships. Radar absorbing material, containing resistive and sometimes magnetic substances, is used on military vehicles to reduce radar reflection. This is the radio equivalent of painting something a dark color so that it cannot be seen by the eye at night.

Radar waves scatter in a variety of ways depending on the size (wavelength) of the radio wave and the shape of the target. If the wavelength is much shorter than the target's size, the wave will bounce off in a way similar to the way light is reflected by a mirror. If the wavelength is much longer than the size of the target, the target may not be visible because of poor reflection.
In a passive radar system, there is no dedicated transmitter. Instead, the receiver uses third-party transmitters in the environment, and measures the time difference of arrival between the signal arriving directly from the transmitter and the signal arriving via reflection from the object.
This allows the bistatic range of the object to be determined. In addition to bistatic range, a passive radar will typically also measure the bistatic Doppler shift of the echo and also its direction of arrival. These allow the location, heading and speed of the object to be calculated. In some cases, multiple transmitters and/or receivers can be employed to make several independent measurements of bistatic range, Doppler and bearing and hence significantly improve the final track accuracy.

The rise of cheap computing power and digital receiver technology in the 1980s led to a resurgence of interest in passive radar technology. For the first time, these allowed designers to apply digital signal processing techniques to exploit a variety of broadcast signals and to use cross-correlation techniques to achieve sufficient signal processing gain to detect targets and estimate their bistatic range and Doppler shift. Classified programmes existed in several nations, but the first announcement of a commercial system was by Lockheed-Martin Mission Systems in 1998, with the commercial launch of the Silent Sentry system, that exploited FM radio and analogue television transmitters.

In a conventional radar system, the time of transmission of the pulse and the transmitted waveform are exactly known. This allows the object range to be easily calculated and for a matched filter to be used to achieve an optimal signal-to-noise ratio in the receiver. A passive radar does not have this information directly and hence must use a dedicated receiver channel (known as the "reference channel") to monitor each transmitter being exploited, and dynamically sample the transmitted waveform. A passive radar typically employs the following processing steps:
Detection range can be determined using the standard radar equation, but ensuring proper account of the processing gain and external noise limitations is taken. Furthermore, unlike conventional radar, detection range is also a function of the deployment geometry, as the distance of the receiver from the transmitter determines the level of external noise against which the targets must be detected. However, as a rule of thumb it is reasonable to expect a passive radar using FM radio stations to achieve detection ranges of up to 150 km, for high-power analogue TV and US HDTV stations to achieve detection ranges of over 300 km and for lower power digital signals (such as cell phone and DAB or DVB-T) to achieve detection ranges of a few tens of kilometers. Other systems include Lockheed-Martin's Silent Sentry - exploiting FM radio stations, BAE Systems' CELLDAR - exploiting GSM base stations, Thales Air Systems' Homeland Alerter - FM radio based system and Cassidian multiband passive radar.
The Cassidian multiband system appears to be more superior, their claim to even detect stealth aircraft. At multiple bands, no aircraft will be able to absorb the whole spectrum of electromagnetic frequencies. Once the mobile receive station picks up and digitize incoming signals, the powerful processors will be able distinguish electromagnetic noise from any faint aircraft signals over a wide spectrum.
During a sensitive territorial dispute between two nations, adding defensive systems would escalate a delicate area. Despite the promise of the meetings for Japan and china, it is still too early to conclude that the crisis has passed.