Australian over-the-horizon digital radar is a winner

Australian researchers have built the world’s most sophisticated radar for research into global communication and navigation infrastructure.

An award-winning new Australian digital radar has been designed and built by La Trobe University electronic engineers and physicists leading a five-member consortium of universities and government organisations.

It is the most sophisticated of its kind in the world for research into the upper atmosphere and how space weather and solar flares impact on global communication and navigation infrastructure.

The new high-frequency, over-the-horizon digital radar offers scientists far greater sensitivity, increased range and a much wider field of view than existing analog instruments.

It provides coverage from mid-latitudes just south of Australia all the way to the polar regions over Antarctica, probing the motion of the ionosphere, 100 to 500 kilometres above the earth’s surface.

It can also image the state of oceans around Australia as a potential early-warning system for tsunamis.

The $1.7 million instrument has just won this year’s peak Engineers Australia - Victoria Engineering Excellence Awards for contributions to the advancement of science and engineering. It competed against giant projects worth tens of millions of dollars such as Melbourne’s M80 Ring Road upgrade.

International sales

The new radar has also attracted international attention. One has already been sold to the British Antarctic Survey while another, built by South Africa’s National Space Agency, is deployed in Antarctica. Nagoya University in Japan has shown interest in a third for its Solar-Terrestrial Environment Laboratory.

La Trobe Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research Professor Keith Nugent said the new radar will increase recognition of Australia on the world stage as a leader in advanced remote-monitoring instrumentation.

‘It’s also wonderful that our engineers, scientists and a significant number of students who have worked on this project for the past three years have been recognised by this highly sought-after Engineering Excellence Award,’ Professor Nugent said.

The new radar is located at Buckland Park near Adelaide in South Australia - the third and latest addition to the southern hemisphere’s TIGER (or Tasman International Geospace Environment Radar) system.

It is operated remotely from the university’s Melbourne campus at Bundoora, along with two other TIGER radars in southern Tasmania and New Zealand designed and built by La Trobe scientists. The first radar at Bruny Island was deployed in 1999.

(Australia’s TIGER system, in turn, plays a key role in the global Super Dual Auroral Radar Network of more than 30 radars used for studying the upper atmosphere and ionosphere.)

TIGER’s development team is headed by Professor of Electronic Engineering John Devlin and Emeritus Professor of Physics Peter Dyson.

Professor Devlin said work on the three-year project was completed last September, on time and well below budget, drawing on the strength and vision in space sciences and engineering developed at La Trobe over many decades.

He said the new radar’s considerable improvements over previous-generation instruments are due to extensive use of new on-chip hardware and parallel antenna design, with a main array that spans 250 metres.

“The cost savings we were able to achieve resulted from numerous innovations and new techniques in the electronics, signal processing and infrastructure,” Professor Devlin said.

Student involvement and community benefit

“Our students were not only extensively involved in design and construction, which provided them with valuable experience and training. They are also now working on projects that exploit the radar’s technical and scientific capabilities.”

Professor Devlin said the radar detects meteor trails, the Earth’s interaction with the solar wind, and geomagnetic storms that can cause large-scale disruptions to communications services and critical infrastructure including power supplies.

‘So it provides very important information by monitoring our upper atmosphere for disruptions that can affect communication, navigation and surveillance systems for shipping, aircraft, and a range of GPS applications that presently rely on data from scientific instruments that have a far more limited field of view and are much harder to maintain,’ he said.

The radar consortium comprises La Trobe’s Department of Electronic Engineering, Newcastle and Adelaide Universities, the Defence Science Technology Organisation and the Bureau of Meteorology.

La Trobe’s TIGER radar research team is made up of engineers Professor John Devlin, Jim Whittington, Eddie Custovic, Darrell Elton, Adam Console, Mark Gentile, Thanh Nguyen and space physicists Emeritus Professor Peter Dyson, Andrew McDonald and Emma Bland.

La Trobe University has also built and operates two cutting-edge scientific imaging spectrometers in Antarctica, at Mawson and Davis that measure wind and temperature in the thermosphere. La Trobe engineering and physics research also supported development of JORN, Australia’s over-the-horizon coastal radar surveillance system.