FIRST RF CORPORATION — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: AF181-061

Description

The US Air Force is responsible for a critical role in providing all US forces with situational awareness on the battlefield. This role, to provide accurate and detailed understanding of the weather, is an enabling factor in operations across the battle space. Currently fielded portable radar systems meet the basic needs of weather sensing, but improved performance, reliability, and lifecycle cost is desired. The next-generation solution developed to enhance the military weather sensing capability will provide deployed units with improved performance to better understand battlefield conditions.Developing a light-weight bistatic Doppler weather radar system requires assembling the best team in the industry, whose experts nearly guarantee a final system that simultaneously can meet the opposing requirements of a robust, low-cost, and high-performance system that can be quickly and easily deployed and operated. FIRST RF Corporation has brought together world-class partners in weather radar and systems engineering to complement our innovative and robust military product heritage. Our proposed approach is based on a scalable radar sensor architecture that provides improved performance and reliability at low cost. The Bistatic Light-weight Doppler Radar (BLDR) will be studied alongside the existing solution and evaluated against the customer requirements.