Mikros gets Navy contract for radar gear

Mikros Systems Corporation announced it has received a $5 million production contract from the U.S. Navy for its ADEPT radar maintenance equipment.

The electronic systems technology company, headquartered in Princeton, said in a news release that the Navy will purchase 54 ADEPT units over the next year, deploying them on Aegis destroyers and cruisers in support of the AN/SPY-1 radar on air defense and ballistic missile defense missions.

“We have been looking forward to this award for some time,” Mikros President Tom Meaney said in the release. “It’s a major corporate milestone and validates all of the hard work we’ve done on ADEPT development. We are delighted that the Navy has chosen to move forward with ADEPT production.”

Mikros said the contract increases its engineering backlog to an all-time high of approximately $8 million in work. It added that the systems will be assembled at Mikros’ Largo, Florida, facility.

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US Air Force Could Award Long-Range Radar Contract Next Week

The U.S. Air Force is close to naming the winner of a contract to produce long-range, ground-based sensors for tracking hostile aircraft and missiles, Defense News reported Wednesday.

Aaron Mehta writes that Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT), Northrop Grumman (NYSE: NOC) and Raytheon (NYSE: RTN) are competing for the Air Force’s Three Dimensional Expeditionary Long-Range Radar development program.

The 3DELRR contract could be awarded next week and the selected contractor will work to build 35 air defense radars for the service, according to Defense News.

Mehta reports the branch plans a critical design review of the system by the end of the first quarter of 2015.

The Air Force also expects the technology to enter low-rate initial production in early fiscal 2018 and achieve initial operational capability by fiscal 2020.

3DELRRs will be built to replace the branch’s legacy AN/TPS-75 field radars, according to Mehta’s article.

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Cutting through the dust: Radar shows moon’s true face for first time

We’ve seen a serious series of super moons this summer and the show’s not over yet. Mark your calendars: the next one will light up on Tuesday, Sept. 9.

While it may seem sunny and clear up on a super moon, a steady rain of space dust and particles is zipping in and striking the moon day in and day out. Undetectable from Earth, these tiny travelers are moving fast.

“Most particles hit the ground at several kilometers per second or more,” explains Bruce Campbell, a geologist at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. “A particle of dust moving at that speed will break a pretty good chunk off a rock.” This particle rain is the dominant erosive effect on the moon, part of an endless process of the rocks being broken down and the dust gradually building up.

This radar image reveals how the lunar impact crater known as Aristillus looks beneath its cover of dust. The radar echoes reveal geologic features of the large debris field created by the force of the impact. The dark “halo” surrounding the crater is due to pulverized debris beyond the rugged, radar-bright rim deposits. The image also shows traces of lava-like features produced when lunar rock melted from the heat of the impact. The crater is approximately 34 miles in diameter and 2 miles deep. Click to enlarge. (Credit: Bruce Campbell, Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum; Arecibo/NAIC; NRAO/AUI/NSF)

Mongolia to reduce radar separation standards in September

Mongolia will reduce radar separation standards between aircraft from 90 to 30 km in September. The move follows a review of the Mongolian Civil Aviation Authority (MCAA) safety assessment requirements by New Zealand air navigation services provider Airways New Zealand.

Airways New Zealand has been helping MCAA to reduce aircraft separation distances following the installation in 2012 of radar sites across the region. Radar control has been gradually introduced, starting with a conservative 90 km separation between aircraft. Airways New Zealand has been working with MCAA to assess reducing radar separation standards to more closely align with the ICAO standard of five nautical miles (10 km). 

Tim Bradding, a former airways safety manager and current regional chief controller who has been working with MCAA, said: “Reducing aircraft separation requirements in a safe manner will allow the Mongolian CAA to more rapidly increase their air traffic flows, with economic benefits across the country and the region.”

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Improved US anti-radar missile hits its mark during test

The US Air Force and missile manufacturer Raytheon Co. successfully tested an upgraded anti-radar missile designed to more accurately take out enemy air defense early-warning systems.

An air force Lockheed Martin F-16 on 22 August fired an AGM-88 high-speed anti-radiation missile (HARM), which scored a direct hit on a specific radar emitter outside a zone of exclusion that included another decoy emitter, Raytheon announces.

The AGM-88 is used to find and destroy surface-to-air missile radars, early warning radars, and radar-directed air defence artillery systems to allow safe battlefield overflight of conflict zones by US and allied aircraft. The missiles identify and home in on the electronic transmissions emitted by radar installations. More than 4,000 HARMs have been fired in combat by the eight nations that include them in their munitions inventories.

"Raytheon's HCSM offers the warfighter enhanced capabilities at an affordable price, providing best value for suppression of enemy air defence weapon options," Mike Jarrett, vice president of Raytheon Air Warfare Systems, says in a statement announcing the test’s success.

Improvements to the missile in the recent test include a HARM control section modification (HCSM) that increases accuracy and precision, thereby reducing the risk of collateral damage, Raytheon says. GPS and an inertial measurement unit provide more accurate targeting and navigation data to the warhead after launch “to engage time-critical targets”, the company says.

The missiles is also specially designed to destroy modern surface-to-air missile installations and resist jamming and other counter-HARM systems.

“The HCSM used its new ... capability and successfully impacted the correct target,” Raytheon says. Yet more testing “is needed to determine if the HCSM is ready for deployment to the US Air Force.”

Raytheon produces HARM missiles under a 2012 contract with the air force and is currently under full-rate production.

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Radar: Your essential tool for safe flying

Radar had its birth in 1886 when Heinrich Hertz demonstrated that radio waves would reflect off of solid objects. 

As usual, war - specifically, the Second World War - spurred forward the development of Radio Detection and Ranging ('Radar' is just an acronym).  

Simply, radar works by sending a signal from a station in a certain direction. The signal will bounce back towards the station if it encounters a solid object. 

Over time we have been able to adjust the strength of our outgoing signals and the sensitivity of our receiver to enable modern day radar to tell us how solid the object is (rain, snow, ice or mountain) and in what direction the object is moving. All very helpful in weather forecasting. 

In aviation, radar is used to track aircraft movement both on ground and in the air. But, behind there’s also a radar behind the round front nose cone of most every aircraft. This helps pilots find other aircraft and, of course, avoid nasty weather and 'granite clouds.'

Great strides have been made in aviation radar in the past 20 years. Pilots can adjust the angle of their radar to inspect the height of clouds ahead and even abeam their planes. They can also look ahead up to several hundred kilometers, allowing themselves the option of avoiding developing weather altogether. 

Under development right now is Lidar. This uses lasers rather than radio waves to detect movement in molecules. 

When we can track movement on that small a scale we will then be able to see areas of turbulent air long before we fly into it.  

There are also developments aimed at making radar become predictive. In essence, it will model what a storm cloud will likely do by the time the aircraft is projected to be near it. That way, aviators can plan their storm avoidance long before they actually near threatening weather. 

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G band atmospheric radars: new frontiers in cloud physics

A. Battaglia¹, C. D. Westbrook², S. Kneifel³, P. Kollias³, N. Humpage¹, U. Löhnert⁴, J. Tyynelä⁵, and G. W. Petty⁶

• ¹Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester, UK
• ²Department of Meteorology, University of Reading, Reading, UK
• ³McGill University, Montreal, Canada
• ⁴Institut für Geophysik und Meteorologie, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
• ⁵Department of Physics, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
• ⁶University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, USA

Abstract. Clouds and associated precipitation are the largest source of uncertainty in current weather and future climate simulations. Observations of the microphysical, dynamical and radiative processes that act at cloud scales are needed to improve our understanding of clouds. The rapid expansion of ground-based super-sites and the availability of continuous profiling and scanning multi-frequency radar observations at 35 and 94 GHz have significantly improved our ability to probe the internal structure of clouds in high temporal-spatial resolution, and to retrieve quantitative cloud and precipitation properties. However, there are still gaps in our ability to probe clouds due to large uncertainties in the retrievals.

The present work discusses the potential of G band (frequency between 110 and 300 GHz) Doppler radars in combination with lower frequencies to further improve the retrievals of microphysical properties. Our results show that, thanks to a larger dynamic range in dual-wavelength reflectivity, dual-wavelength attenuation and dual-wavelength Doppler velocity (with respect to a Rayleigh reference), the inclusion of frequencies in the G band can significantly improve current profiling capabilities in three key areas: boundary layer clouds, cirrus and mid-level ice clouds, and precipitating snow.

Citation: Battaglia, A., Westbrook, C. D., Kneifel, S., Kollias, P., Humpage, N., Löhnert, U., Tyynelä, J., and Petty, G. W.: G band atmospheric radars: new frontiers in cloud physics, Atmos. Meas. Tech., 7, 1527-1546, doi:10.5194/amt-7-1527-2014, 2014.

80K6 - a vehicle-carried three-dimensional all-round-looking Ukrainian radar system

The 80K6 is a vehicle-carried three-dimensional all-round-looking radar system designed to detect and track airborne targets flying at low, medium and high altitudes. It can operate independently or as a part of regional or nation-wide computer-aided control systems. The technology was designed and developed by the State Research and Production Complex Iskra.

If deployed with Air Defense Missile Force units, the 80K6 is used for target data generation for air defense missile weapons control systems. It can also be used by Air Force and air defense elements for air traffic control applications.

The 80K6 radar system offers performance capabilities as following:

• The detection and tracking of air targets;
• 3D location and cruising speed measurement of air targets in the presence of active/passive jamming or natural noise, or mix of these two;
• Friend-or-foe air target identification;
• Receiving flight-related information from friendly aircraft and transmitting the information to authorized users;
• measuring the difference in flying target levels for accurate target designation;
• determining azimuth and elevation bearings of active jamming dispensers;
• feeding output data into autonomous imagers;
• interoperation with command posts of local and higher nation-wide computerized control systems.

In terms of its technical characteristics and performance capabilities, the 80K6 radar system is as good as foreign-designed equivalents, while being at least fifty percent less expensive. The entire 80K radar system installation finds enough room onboard a single vehicle.

The accomplishment of very demanding performance capabilities was made possible by the employment of sophisticated state-of-the-art technical solutions, including:

• low side lobe digital phased array providing enhanced performance capabilities involving target location in elevation and resistance to enemy active jamming attempts;
• a klystron with a high gain factor which is used as transmitting device, providing the required level of average transmitting power while being not bulky and consuming little power;
• Non-conventional design and configuration of the all-pass filter, providing an enhanced target discrimination performance capability and enabling target discrimination to be performed concurrently with the measurement of targets’ range rates;
• improved primary information pre-processing algorithms enabling processing losses to be reduced to the minimum;
• optimized target tracking algorithms enabling the multiple target tracking performance capability to be improved significantly;
• equipping operator workstations with color displays, enabling operations to be performed in bright daylight.

See PDF booklet

Operating frequency range	S-band (2700…2900 MHz)
Target detection
range	6 – 8 … 400 km
in azimuth	360°
elevation	0 ... 30 – 35°
ceiling	400 km
Scanning interval	5; 10 sec
Detection range for targets with RCS equal to 3-5 m2, at P=0.8 and F=10-6,
at altitudes up to 100 m	40 km
at altitudes up to 1,000 m	110 km
at altitudes from 10 to 30 km	300 – 350 km
Clutter suppression coefficient	> 50 dB
Number of targets tracked simultaneously	150-200
Time into and out of action	< 30 min

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Missile Defense | MDA Kill Vehicle Redesign, Target Radar Gain Traction on Hill

By Mike Gruss | Aug. 25, 2014

The Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee, chaired by Sen. Richard Durbin (above), a missile defense skeptic, noted that the new kill vehicle and the long-range target-discrimination radar are likely to cost more than $1 billion each to develop. Credit: DoD photo by Glenn Fawcett

WASHINGTON — Two U.S. Missile Defense Agency initiatives designed to bolster the reliability and thus credibility of the primary U.S. territorial shield have won support from congressional appropriators, but lawmakers in both the House and Senate have made clear their intent to closely scrutinize the billion-dollar efforts.

The efforts in question are a redesigned kill vehicle for the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system interceptors, variants of which are currently deployed at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, and Fort Greely, Alaska, and a long-range target-discrimination radar.

National Weather Service in Raleigh debuts faster Doppler radar

Meteorologists at the National Weather Service in Raleigh recently got an upgrade to their Doppler radar, giving them more data and quicker updates when the weather turns severe.

The upgrade, called SAILS, or Supplemental Adaptive Intra-Volume Low-Level Scan, allows the meteorologists to get radar images from the lowest part of the storm every 2 minutes instead of every 4.

“More frequent updates of what's going on near the ground gives us a better idea of what's about to hit the ground or impact the ground,” said NWS meteorologist Jonathan Blaes.

Blaes says the radar does more than just show where it’s raining. “It scans at multiple slices to get a 3D view of precipitation, thunderstorms and other phenomena,” he said.

Seeing what's happening inside a storm gives forecasters an idea of how dangerous it is and can tell them if a tornado is forming.

“The more observations you can get the closer to where people live, that's always helpful,” WRAL Chief Meteorologist Greg Fishel said.

WRAL’s DUALDoppler5000 radar scans the lowest layer of the atmosphere once every minute. That radar, along with the Weather Service's newly upgraded Doppler radar, gives forecasters a better chance of spotting dangerous storms. That helps them issue better warnings and save more lives.
“More data is always better, and that's what we're excited about,” Fishel said.

The National Weather Service radar upgrade is in place now, ready for the next severe weather season, which typically happens in the fall. Another upgrade is planned within the next year to allow even more frequent updates.

The National Weather Service is working on a new kind of radar system, already used in the military, called Phased Array Radar. It will scan in less than one minute and cost less to operate. It likely will be a decade before those radars are installed, Blaes said.

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Honeywell, Rockwell Collins roll out advanced cockpit radar

Vernon Bryant/Staff Photographer

Captain Bill Lusk of Southwest Airlines explains what the radar is showing to the media on a monitor during a Honeywell test flight that left out of Dallas Love Field Airport in Dallas on Wednesday, August 13, 2014. Honeywell developed new technology that helps pilots spot bad weather and then, by showing them the storm in 3-D, help them steer around it.

SOMEWHERE OVER SOUTH TEXAS — Smart pilots fly away from bad weather. But on this sweltering summer day, Markus Johnson and Joe Duval are flying straight toward thunderstorms swelling up over the Gulf of Mexico along the South Texas coast.

It’s not because they long to fly their 1952 Convair 540 through the rollercoaster of updrafts and downdrafts or to be pummeled by hail and rain. It’s to show off the latest generation of Honeywell International Inc.’s weather radar system, known as IntuVue.

They use the radar to skirt the right side of a good-size thunderstorm between Houston and Galveston, then the left side of another thunderstorm to the airplane’s right.

Inside the storms, the radar shows a lot of green (light rain) and yellow (medium rain) with a smidgen of red (heavy rain). But on the flight itself, the airplane glides through nearly smooth air as it flies between the two summer storms.

Of course, airlines and other aircraft operators have used radar for decades to help them locate and avoid storms. It’s a rare airplane that doesn’t have radar equipment installed in its nose and a display screen in the cockpit.

What Honeywell touts is that its new radar system displays a lot more information in greater detail, in three dimensions, and pilots don’t have to work nearly so hard to get it.

Greg Schauder, a Honeywell director of product marketing, said the two-dimensional radars usually require a pilot to manually change the radar scan if he wants to look higher up or lower down in a storm or in different directions. The radar collects information only where the pilot has asked it to scan.

Radar software may fix weather forecast issues caused by wind farms

The movement of wind turbine propellers can mimic weather when viewed by the Doppler radar used by Environment Canada to predict storms. (Robert F. Bukaty/Associated Press)

Environment Canada is preparing to roll out new radar technology in order to combat wind farm clutter, which clouds weather forecasts, misleads meteorologists and can even block radar signals.

Jim Young, who works at the agency's national radar program, said new software will be incorporated into Canada's radar system this fall in an effort to address the "contamination" caused by wind turbines.

Environment Canada testing radar software to combat wind farm clutter

Wind turbines are shown in this file photo. (The Canadian Press/Dave Chidley)

Clare Clancy, The Canadian Press Published Sunday, August 10, 2014 9:20AM EDT

TORONTO -- Environment Canada is preparing to roll out new radar technology in order to combat wind farm clutter, which clouds weather forecasts, misleads meteorologists and can even block radar signals.

Jim Young, who works at the agency's national radar program, said new software will be incorporated into Canada's radar system this fall in an effort to address the "contamination" caused by wind turbines.

"I certainly have very high hopes," he said, adding that Environment Canada has been concerned about wind farm clutter for years.

The agency uses Doppler radar to predict storms, but the movement of wind turbine propellers can mimic weather.

Lecture “Radar Fundamentals” by David Jenn

Radar Fundamentals