Directional sensitivity of track initialisation of a multistatic Doppler‐only passive radar network

A multistatic passive radar network originally presented in Ptak et al. for long‐distance aircraft tracking is sensitive to track initialisation errors. When these errors exceed 50 km, target tracking often diverges. Initialisation can be improved by even coarse directional information. The impact of binary directional information was studied, which allows flights to be assigned to start from east or west of the multistatic network. Substantial improvement to the performance of flight tracking is observed on reference data based on Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast information.