The paper presents the idea of the application of passive radar on board of an airplane. The aim of the passive coherent location (PCL) system is to provide surveillance information to the pilot (or autopilot), to detect the targets in the surveillance space, and to protect the platform from collisions and other threats. The PCL system can use the available emitters of opportunity, mainly digital terrestrial TV (DVB-T) transmitters. Other sources of illuminations, such as analogue (FM) or digital radio (DAB) can be used as well.

A method for improving range resolution in passive radar system is to jointly use more than one transmission channel of the same illuminator of opportunity (IO). This paper specifically focuses on the exploitation of multiple adjacent digital video broadcasting-terrestrial (DVB-T) channels for achieving high-range resolution profiles with a passive radar system operating in air surveillance scenario. Firstly, we present an analysis of the ambiguity function obtained from a multichannel DVB-T source and a pre-processing technique able to improve the characteristics of the multichannel signal are presented. Afterwards, the experimental scenario is defined and detection results on aerial targets are shown.