Chirp signals arise in many applications of signal processing. In thispaper, we address the problem of detection of chirp signals that areencountered in a bistatic radar which we are developing for remotesensing of cosmic ray induced air showers. The received echoesfrom the air showers are wideband and characterized by very shortsweep periods. This makes our astrophysical problem a challengingone, since a very short sweep period is equivalent to a very lowenergy chirp signal. We propose a rake-like receiver which consistsof a set of filters matched to different chirp rates within a rangeof interest. We examine the detection capability of the proposedstructure through extensive numerical analysis. We also report animplementation of the proposed receiver on a National InstrumentsFlexRIO FPGA board and evaluate its performance in a laboratorysetting.