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Surface vessels and low-altitude aircraft
below the radar horizon can now be detected
using this shore-based radar.
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OVER THE HORIZON RADAR Defence Innovation Helps Protect Our Borders
Canada has one of the world's longest coastlines, representing enormous challenges to those agencies responsible for surveillance against illegal imports, immigration and threats to our fish stocks and national security. Airborne surveillance using Canada’s fleet of Aurora Aircraft is effective but expensive. Operating costs of the Aurora are reported to be in the order of tens of thousands of dollars per hour.
A team of DRDC Scientists led by Drs. Hing Chan and Harold Wilson work on a project at Shirleys Bay, that is aimed at reducing these costs and improving Canada's effectiveness in monitoring maritime traffic along our coastline. The fundamental problem with using radar to monitor offshore maritime traffic is that common radar signals, like beams of light travel in a straight line. Consequently, targets below the horizon are not detectable using ground-based radars.
The DRDC radar takes advantage of a particular propagation characteristic of electromagnetic signals, called surface wave, to operate in a frequency regime where the radar signal actually follows the earth's curvature. As a result, surface vessels and low-altitude aircraft below the radar horizon can now be detected using this shore-based radar. Canada will soon have the ability to put in place a very cost-effective wide-area coastal surveillance radar network based on this technology. This coastal surveillance radar network can monitor the 200 nautical mile Economic Exclusion Zone (EEZ) continually.
DRDC's commercial partner in this project, Raytheon Canada, is investing cooperatively with DRDC and has the rights to sell the technology worldwide. Dr. Chan says, "There is excellent commercial potential in this technology. Competing technologies such as sky wave radar and aircraft surveillance are much more expensive, lacking some of the potential advantages that we offer. DRDC continues developing this technology. Areas of study include the reduction of interfering noise caused by radar reflecting off of the ionosphere and the use of data fusion with other sensors to increase the information that can be gained from the data."
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