MoD in £1.75m rush order for SAS backpack radars Here at the Farnborough Air Show, the emphasis is mostly on flying machines and associated sky-tech. But there are a few exhibitors who don't have their heads in the clouds. One such company is Plextek, an electronic engineering consultancy outfit based in Cambridge, which is here this week showing off its portable battery- …
Hmm...maybe not.
Still looks like an incredibly useful piece of kit. Detecting a crawling man at 1.5K? Impressive, very impressive.
Rig a network of them to one of the gunbots they're working on and there'll be no sneaking up on our 7.62mm armed robotic masters then!
A defence product that does something useful!
A defence product that works!
A defence product costing less than £100k a pop!
Explanation: BAE not involved.
Advice to MOD: buy what you need before BAE steps in and fucks things up.
Nice to see that UK companies can still turn out world class kit though...
Finally, a perimiter defence system for the remote retreat I'm preparing to wait out the zombie apocalypse.
It's perfect - before this came along I was counting on sentries (vulnerable); PIR wouldn't work as zombies are dead, hence cold. This can even distinguish between the undead and any living raiders trying to bespoil the womenfolk and steal our gruel.
"must have line of sight"
"incredible performance in rocky, mountainous terrain"
rocky, mountainous terrain normally have these little things called big rocks and mountains that block LOS....
will it only pick up people as well - or, more likely, will every random passing sheep set it off....
seems like Lewis loves the concept (and there is nothing wrong with that) but is basing his pro-piece purely on their marketing, which could be BS.
I could do with one of these on my car, I can think of a few 'floor it and hope' near-blind junctions it would help at.
Also, it wouldn't be a lot of use on the US border. The top-whack range is 8km, so you'd need one at least every 4 miles (to give a bit of overlap) and that would only find the pick-up trucks. To find people you'd need one every half-mile. The US/Mexico border is 1969 miles long.
At 60k a pop it's probably still cheaper than the current border project, but you'd have to find a way to power 4000 of things in such a way that the cables won't get nicked for the scrap copper.
How can you tell the difference between a crawling man and a sheep at 1500m, apart from the wellies?
Seriously though picking up a moving biological object with radar isn't much use unless you can tell what it is, and where it is. I'd have thought a crawling man or sheep, at 1.5Km = Water Buffalo at 2Km, Cat at 1km and rat at .5Km.
So attaching it to a visual recognition system might help.
Don't we already have a man portable radar system? Not the newest of things, but still not too shabby.
On paper it might weigh twice as much, but that includes the whole kit. Including the terminal for display & control.
It also has the advantage of being a proper field tested bit of MIL-Spec equipment, Blighter on the other hand looks a bit fragile e.g. connectors that you'll snap off, and a not very robust tripod. And an MSTAR will work in extreme temperatures & conditions that would kill a 'rugged' laptop.
Then there's compatibility - standard equipment interfaces, and it runs on the standard radio batteries (or even a pack of AA's) rather than some unique to type lithium job.
I also believe the radar detection and target identification is rather effective too. Certainly you can identify someone just from them standing and breathing.
Not that Blighter is a bad bit of equipment. It's just that it looks like you get what you pay for, and it isn't a complete package or necessarily up to a full-on field deployment.
Probably OK as a network of 'cheap' sensors on a perimeter though, and given how things are in Afghanistan I guess that's how they'll be used rather than the way an MSTAR is usually deployed.
If I remember rightly, this is not a new idea, and what killed the old one was doppler radar had a real problem differentiating between real people moving around and branches moving in a breeze. Unless the back-end software has improved I'd still prefer a thermal imaging backup to help identify the false alarms.
Old chestpack radar kits.
Absolutely right,Matt. In 1971 I was on the permanent staff at the School of Signals, Blandford Forum in Dorset. At the nearby Royal Radar Establishment at Malvern they had the newly developed "man pack" man portable radar on trial. Trouble was,it took THREE men to make it man portable! It was on field trials and was intended for the infantry. I always wondered what happened to this "Gee-Whiz" technology,for that is what this seeemed like at the time. We used to swap yarns,(and a lot of "Bullshit") with the guys at Malvern.
"Surely we could get any number of Chinooks for the money we're wasting on this system?"
They're spending £1.75 on Bligher, you'd probably have to spend about 10 times that to by a new Chinook, if any were available which they aren't.
The MoD have tried to buy more from Boeing but there aren't any currently available
@Mute button - No mate. The "real" boys just use a Swiss army knife to cut the link to the speaker. Only wimps ned the noises to tell them what is what.
@Chris Roughneen - Have you tried to hit anything at 3 Km ?? Just the windage will make sure you miss *everytime* !!
@AC - 15 Kg means no food - Maybe for wimps like you. Real men carry standard 30 Kg packs in addition to their rifle, ammo and other bits and bobs like two 1.5L water bottles when operating in rather dry climes !! This is no different from machinegunners and their gunner's mate who have to carry a heavy machinegun, tripod and lots of ammo and still find room for the food and other necessities !! Otherwise, operating for 30 days at the front on one pair of nickers will get you classified as a WMD (Weapon of Mass Disgust) !!
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