Shoebox man-tracker radar flies in nimble drone

Fascinating

It's unfortunate that this technology is required but that doesn't take way from its brilliance. Fascinating stuff!

So...

If it's built by a US company then it's good, but if it's a UK product it's pork? What a shocking conclusion! </sarcasm>

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The antenna dimensions and design make it pretty obvious that the resolution isn't going to be great - I suspect the 35cm number is very much an optimal figure and probably at minimum operating altitude.

The lack of on-board processing is another reason it's so small and light - with this type of system you're constrained by the size of the antenna you can install, the weight of the antenna array & back-end signal conversion hardware, and the sheer amount of processing grunt it takes to convert the radar data into imagery particularly in real-time. Obviously computers get smaller & lighter constantly for a given amount of performance, but it still wouldn't be trivial to make an ultra compact platform. Though at least with the toy antenna they don't actually have much data to worry about.

Adding MTI and using it to steer a camera is trivial once the data is processed so I don't dispute this could be possible and useful. But obviously that requires real-time on-board processing of the radar data, and a radar actually capable of identifying smaller targets...

But anyway... the main point of the article seems to be to imply that the US product is great and wonderful, and that UK products are (as usual!) a waste of time. Not only is this line getting a bit boring, but it also shows a complete misunderstanding of the differing capabilities of the platforms.

If you had any knowledge of the SAR systems you'd recognise the difference between a large airliner hosted system (eg. SOSTAR or Nimrod), a full-sized drone based system (e.g. Watchkeeper) and a micro-sized system (eg. nanoSAR). While each is useful you can't argue that one could replace another as they have very different capabilities in terms of range, scan area and resolution. This means they'll do different tasks in the field and while the large systems can do the job of the small ones it doesn't work the same way in reverse.

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It's also worth considering that if you spend cash on US hardware the money is gone, never to be seen again, whereas if you spend it in the UK most of it is quickly recovered via taxes on companies, workers, materials etc., which makes the bill not quite so bad. The Treasury makes the 'benefits' system work on this basis and I imagine they have similar thoughts when it comes to defence procurement. I would guess other factors like increased employment of skilled workers, possible export opportunities and maybe even buying the best system for the job also come into it.

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Finally, for future reference you'll probably find that a border surveillance system (eg. Eye o' Sauron) will work on a completely different principle as it would be about classic target detection & location rather than generating imagery. Such systems can detect you just from the motion of breathing, but they'll only flag range & bearing rather than producing one of those nice SAR images. There may be a degree of target categorisation too (e.g tracked vehicle, large vehicle, large breathing animal, small breathing animal) but that would depend on what was on the back end - generally a man with some headphones....

Swarm tactics?

I like the idea of a group of ScanEagles working together - one with the SAR pack and maybe two others carrying a Hellfire each, and spaced out they would be harder to spot than the bigger Reaper. But I think the flying pork barrel of Watchkeeper has far too much momentum now, and there's nothing to stop them saying that the reduction in weight/size of NanoSAR allows them to strap more fuel/missiles to Watchkeeper.

The Us are behind on this ine.

There is actually already a UK company producing a similar SAR radar that is lighter, and already capable on real time image processing.

http://www.selex-sas.com/EN/Common/files/SelexSAS_UK/pdf_datasheet/radar/picosar2.pdf

If I was bobbing around in the north sea.......

in my orange suit, I think that I would rather see and hear a Nimrod full of smoke floats, flares, rubber ducks and people than hear a sewing machine with wings and see nothing.

Amazing image quality on existing technology

Having used the Scan Eagle in combat, I can personally attest to the extremely high quality of what I'm assuming was the "standard" image package.

I would love to see what these new technologies will enable American and British warfighters to do in the future.

On a somewhat related note, having worked with almost every type of special forces troops that are operating in Iraq today, I can say that the most professional and most fun to work with were British and Australian SAS and SBS.