Much research and development in the field of Multistatic radar has been performed throughout the years. Alot of this work has either continued or evolved from projects and research performed from as early as before WWII.

In the military sector, the complexity of systems is growing rapidly to overcome new challenges associated with military operations on both inland and the sea. The requirements of radar systems, and other related applications in particular, are changing in relation to these new challenges.

Some of the challenges includes designing systems which are not easily detectable, and hence are immune to the enemy. Such systems involves a low energy radiation level from the receiver.

Bistatic systems are such systems, whereby the receiver and the transmitter are seperated by a comparable distance. Much of the energy radiated by a radar, is mainly contributed by the transmitter. With such a system, the transmitter is located elsewhere, and hence the receiver is susceptable from damage. If however, the transmitter in use had been destryoed, the receiver can be easily changed to adapted using signals transmitted from other avalible transmitters.

For this particular research, the use of terrestrial television signals will be used as the transmitting source.

This research project is focused on the designs and sinulations of the television-based bistatic radar system. The main focus surrounding this research is to gather the literature related to this topic for an assesement on how to persue the design and development for the system. Various systems have been designed and implemented by people throughout the world, and most of these systems have been looked into for the consideration of designing such a system.

Besides from the hardware designs and simulations, a simulator has also been created in IDL for the prediction of the SNR values for a certain distance away from both the receiver and transmitter. This simulator is specifically designed to indicate these SNR plots over South Africa.

Some real-time data has been captured via the use of a pc television card, and the analysis of this data for Doppler extractions is performed.

This research project is being carried out by the following members shown in the Table below.