4Correlating: Passive and Active Software-Defined Radio (SDR)–RADAR
4.1 SDR–RADAR Requirements and Design
Software-defined radio (SDR) is characterized by giving access to the raw in-phase/quadrature (IQ) radio frequency stream to the user, prior to any processing other than transposing from the radio frequency band to baseband by mixing with the two copies of the local oscillator, in phase and in quadrature. Hence, SDR is perfectly suited for investigating properties of the radio frequency signal, whether direction of arrival (DoA), as was demonstrated for Global Positioning System (GPS) spoofing detection when analyzing the same signal received by multiple antennas [Feng et al., 2021], or radio-frequency detection and ranging (RADAR). More generally, the concepts introduced in this chapter, aimed at illustrating how to detect time-delayed copies of a known transmitted signal (target range) through the correlation estimator, are useful whenever a known pattern is searched in a noisy signal, whether a header identifying the beginning of a sentence in a stream of bits or whether the code assigned to a given emitted in a code division multiple access (CDMA) scheme. We shall demonstrate how correlation is efficiently calculated in the Fourier domain and hence allow the reader to understand existing software such as gnss-sdr, the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) decoder relying on GNU Radio for scheduling and acquiring GNSS signals before decoding to provide position, ...
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