Navy to help Telephonics upgrade RDR-1700B maritime search radar system to classify surface vessels
PATUXENT RIVER NAS, Md., 11 Aug. 2011. U.S. Navy officials are working with the Telephonics Corp. Radar Systems Division in Farmingdale, N.Y., to incorporate ship-classification software in the Telephonics RDR-1700B maritime surveillance and search-and-rescue radar system for helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The Telephonics RDR-1700B maritime surveillance and imaging radar is designed to search, detect, and track several different targets during over-water surveillance.Officials from Naval Air Systems Command at Patuxent River Naval Air Station, Md., plan to award a contract to Telephonics to develop a maritime classification aids (MCA) processing environment for the RDR-1700B using Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) software and hardware layers. Terms of the contract have yet to be negotiated.The OSI model is designed to divide communications systems into parts, or layers, each of which provides services to its upper layer, and receives services from the layer below it.
The Telephonics RDR-1700B is a 1-kilowatt X-Band search radar for missions like airborne maritime patrol, search and rescue, maritime interdiction, economic exclusion zone patrol, contraband and illegal immigration control, and fisheries protection. The radar system's three primary line-replaceable units (LRUs) weigh less than 75 pounds and consume about 625 Watts, company officials say.
The radar detects and displays as many as 200 surface targets and displays the operator-selected tracked targets data. The system has terrain mapping capability to detect and display surface objects like coastlines, islands, and exposed rocks, as well as prominent objects like boats and ships. The RDR-1700B also detects rainfall, thunderstorms, hail, and wet snow.
The system has a four-color that helps determine the severity of rainstorms, and can interrogate and receive pulses from search-and-rescue transponder (SART) beacons used by the U.S. Coast Guard for private boating and commercial shipping. The system interrogates and receives pulses from SART beacons at distances as far as 15 nautical miles, and can receive SART asynchronous replies from as far away as 60 nautical miles.
The RDR-1700B has three modes to image and help identify target types: inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR), strip-map, and spotlight SAR that use pulse-compressed waveforms and Doppler processing. ISAR imaging uses target rotational motion to provide the cross-range resolution and stretch-pulse compression to provide one meter range resolution.
For more information contact Telephonics Radar Systems online at www.telephonics.com/radar.asp, or Naval Air Systems Command at www.navair.navy.mil.
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John Keller | Editor
John Keller is editor-in-chief of Military & Aerospace Electronics magazine, which provides extensive coverage and analysis of enabling electronic and optoelectronic technologies in military, space, and commercial aviation applications. A member of the Military & Aerospace Electronics staff since the magazine's founding in 1989, Mr. Keller took over as chief editor in 1995.
