This paper discusses the use of a passive radar experimental system based on mobile communication signals for detecting and tracking airplanes on the airport runways. We employ a two-stage strategy, taking advantage of the fact that the estimation region is limited to the runways. In the first stage, we focus the detection of moving targets in the passive radar data. In the second stage, we classify the runway targets and determine their location on the runway. This also involves a classification task, where the detections are assigned to specific runways or other moving objects such as flying airplanes. The approach is evaluated with data from a measurement campaign conducted at Frankfurt airport.

Closing the feedback loop has proven essential for performance improvement and enhancing system reliability in a number of applications. Track evaluation addresses these goals by investigating system influences and analyzing discrepancies between expected and actual operation. Developing a model of a passive radar system which approximates its operational capabilities is therefore not only essential for performance prediction and pre-operational analysis but offers the opportunity for further system improvement. In the following, we assess the fit of a passive radar model to real-world data to investigate if it provides a reasonable representation of the observed results. There, we show that the detection probability model as well as the estimated lower bound on achievable estimation accuracy, where we utilize the Cramér-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB), give a reasonable approximation of real-world results collected by a passive radar system which utilizes Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) signals.