Silent Guard, radar passive anti stealth dari Ceko

ERA launches its Silent Guard demonstrator for passive detection of non-cooperative flying targets

Pardubice, May 14th, 2013 ERA has recently been developing a Multistatic Primary Surveillance Radar (MSPSR) passive known also as a Passive Coherent Location system (PCL) and has presented its demonstrator to military customers. The newest, mobile version of this technology for air to ground surveillance will be introduced to the general public for the 1st time at the IDET Exhibition 2013 in Brno.

ERA's demonstrator in mobile wagon called Silent Guard is another significant milestone in MSPSR technology development project and has already demonstrated its capabilities. ERA participated in a military exercise on the Western Bohemian border a month ago.
“The aim was to demonstrate passive systems capability for detecting a variety of targets with different flight behaviours. ERA provided coverage of the training with an online target data transfer from PCL as well as PET (VERA-NG) systems for four days during the trials. It was the first actual usage of those two combined systems ever,” stated Vojtěch Stejskal, head of ERA's R&D team.

Long term experience with military Electronic Support Measurement (ESM) systems such as Tamara and the recent VERA-NG has served as motivation for ERA Company to continue with research dedicated to primary passive radar – technology usually known as PCL, or in EUROCONTROL terminology, MSPSR passive. In contrast to an ESM system such as VERA-NG which exploits a different kind of signal emissions generated by a target, PCL utilises a reflected signal and is therefore able to detect not only non-cooperative but also non-emitting targets by means of a Bistatic Radar principle.

On the principles of PCL technology

Similarly to primary radars, the PCL system utilises signals scattered by targets. Unlike them, however, the system remains fully passive as the so-called transmitter of the opportunity concept is used for target illumination. The transmitter of opportunity is typically intended for analogue or digital radio or television broadcasting and is operated by a third party (usually a telecommunication authority). The PCL system is based on bistatic radar, since the receiver and transmitter are spatially separated. The bistatic configuration is particularly suitable for detection of targets with monostatic RCS and the property of non-electromagnetic emissions which makes them otherwise undetectable.

On the PCL system demonstrator

The PCL system demonstrator has been developed in ERA as an FM based multistatic radar. It utilises up to eight element circular array antennas and commercial FM radio transmitters as illuminators of opportunity in order to detect and track airborne targets. At the moment, the system is able to process up to eight FM radio channels and has a single receiving site; hence eight bistatic radar configurations are utilised. The system is prepared for cluster solution due to an extremely flexible architecture and can be modulary changed to multiple distributed receivers with a multiple amount of spatially distributed bistatic configurations.

“We intend to have two versions of MSPSR, one passive and the other equipped with dedicated transmitters, for the civil market in the future. Our intention is to combine multistatic and multilateration technologies, thereby allowing us to provide a complete solution for primary and secondary surveillance. We believe this is the future of surveillance” stated ERA's Managing Director Viktor Sotona.