As Frequency-Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar systems become increasingly prevalent across various sensing applications, detecting their presence is crucial to mitigate interference and address potential security risks. Existing methods for spectrum sensing or detecting unintended Radio Frequency (RF) transmissions rely on expensive specialized hardware because these radars typically operate in the GHz frequency range and utilize large bandwidths. To overcome these limitations, we present ChirpEye, a simple but effective tag design that is capable of identifying FMCW radar waveforms without requiring prior knowledge of radar parameters such as chirp slope, operating frequency, or bandwidth. In addition, ChirpEye can identify the direction of incident signal, hinting at the potential location of the radar. The key innovation of ChirpEye lies in its novel tag design, which uses multiple antennas and delay lines to process GHz-level radar signals with only kHz sampling rates. The tag structure generates unique baseband frequencies that are proportional to FMCW waveform parameters. We also propose a new super-resolution algorithm, called Spectra-MUSIC, which can accurately estimate these beat frequencies from noisy data. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that ChirpEye achieves 99% accuracy in detecting FMCW radars at distances up to 15 meters with less than 5% median error in estimating the radar chirp slope and less than 15 degrees median error in estimating the direction of the radar.

This paper introduces BiScatter2 as an extension of BiScatter [3], an integrated radar backscatter communication and sensing system. BiScatter2 provides simultaneous uplink and downlink communications, and precise radar-based sensing and localization. By refining the signal processing techniques and tag architecture design, BiScatter2 extends the operational range, setting a new baseline for two-way radar backscatter systems. This functionality is enabled through the use of chirp-slope-shift-keying modulation applied to Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radars. BiScatter2 incorporates passive differential circuitry on backscatter tags for efficient, low-power decoding and extends its coverage range by combining the tag decoder and retro-reflective structure. Our evaluation results show an increase of 46% maximum range under the same throughput in downlink communication, which increases the original work's capability for commercial radars.