The French Defence Procurement Agency (DGA) has placed orders for two Thales’ Coast Watcher 100 coastal surveillance radars. This coastal surveillance radar is specially designed for the critically important role of protecting national coastlines from a broad array of threats. The radars will be installed at the DGA missile test ranges of Mediterranean Sea and Landes. Thales will provide through-life support and security maintenance for seven years.
In today’s constantly changing world, the focus of maritime threat detection has shifted from blue-water operations to coastal and littoral zones. Protecting these zones is a complex challenge because such a wide range of risks and threats need to be taken into account (intrusion by hostile vessels and/or aircraft into sensitive areas, trafficking, shipping accidents, maritime pollution, etc.). This calls for improved maritime surveillance capabilities, especially to identify and track intelligent, rapid, highly maneuverable and often fleeting targets in all sea states.
Developed, manufactured and installed by Thales, the Coast Watcher 100s will ensure optimal protection for tactical test areas, monitor maritime traffic in and around those areas and detect any intrusive threats. According to Thales, customers need to know the real-time positions of all platforms involved in tests and must be able to respond immediately to any threats. To meet these requirements, Thales designs extremely precise sighting, detection and identification systems and solutions.
The Coast Watcher 100 is built around a Modular Solid-State Transmitter permitting high performances and availability. It is associated with a COTS (PC) hardware-based processing allowing the best performance/cost ratio. The Kinematic Scan To Scan signal processing technology of the algorithm, performs a precise filtering of all environmental clutters (including extreme weather conditions), allowing precise small target detection, discrimination and a low false alarm rate. It allows very small target detection even in a harsh environment. It simply provides detection, where competitors are blind.
This X-band long-range radar can detect inflatables, jet skis and other small craft to commercial aircraft and warships. This enables fast decisions at every decisive moment and deployment of the most appropriate and effective responses. Currently there are 20 of these systems operational globally in different nations.
