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BAE Systems has successfully demonstrated a passive geo-location
capability that enables aircraft to quickly pinpoint the location
of enemy emitters positions (radars, communications equipment
etc) in crowded radio frequency (RF) environments. The new system
can be deployed on any type of military aircraft. The company
demonstrated, for the first time, the ability to nearly instantaneously
construct a geo-location solution, based on data received on
a single platform. Other signals intelligence (SIGINT) sensors
conduct a more complex process, "fixing" a hostile
emitter by measuring angles of arrival of the emitter's pulses
at several stations receiving the same pulse simultaneously,
at different locations.
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The new capability,
demonstrated at the U.S. Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division,
China Lake, Calif., enables aircraft to calculate geo-location
with any radio frequency (RF) signal. “The battlespace
is a complex environment that is increasingly saturated with
RF energy. These conditions make it hard for multiple aircraft
to simultaneously detect the same signal,” said Dr. Hugh
Kao, BAE Systems technical director at Yonkers, N.Y. “The
technology we have demonstrated enables accurate real-time geo-location
of threat signals from bits and pieces of data.” The capability
has already been tested in a series of flights.
The Department of Defense’s Joint Strike Fighter program
office supported the flight testing, which was accomplished
with a single T-39 aircraft and a ground station performing
as a “virtual” aircraft. The demonstration follows
BAE Systems’ successful demonstration, in November 2004,
of how a single aircraft can passively detect and locate threat
radars. The flights were conducted at Eglin Air Force Base,
Fla., using an F-15 fighter.
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