DeTect meteorological products include RAPTOR Radar Wind Profilers and the HARRIER low cost Weather Radar.

Radar Wind Profilers :

Radar wind profiler (RWP) technology has advanced significantly over the past five years as computer hardware and software have become significantly more capable and as faster analog-to-digital converters (ADC's) utilizing on-board full digital-down-converters have become readily available. This has resulted in a new generation of modern radar wind profilers that are more reliable and more capable and that produce higher quality measurements than conventional systems.

DeTect’s Meteorological Systems Group is at the forefront in advancing RWP technology and has developed a new generation of modern systems that incorporate the latest in digital processing technology and functionality delivering significantly improved system performance and reliability. DeTect’s engineers have a broad range experience in design, development, testing, installation, operation, maintenance and data analysis on many operational and research wind profiler systems worldwide.  This includes development and application of advanced signal processing techniques for wind profilers for government, aviation and industrial clients.  Relevant experience also includes manufacture and installation of traditional coaxial-collinear (COCO) antennas for 50, 404, 449, and 482 MHz radar wind profilers and modernization of these older systems.  DeTect also produces smaller boundary layer systems (e.g., 915 MHz) and also provides upgrades of other vendor systems to the RAPTOR technology.  

DeTect’s RAPTOR RWP system represents the state-of-the-art and incorporates modern software, signal processing techniques and data acquisition hardware.  As the unit was designed and engineered from the “ground up” the system incorporates a renewed emphasis on reliability, sustainability, and long-term supportability. System features :

• Utilization of software defined radio (SDR) cards for a full digital intermediate frequency receiver
• Robust and user-friendly software interfaces
• Highly advanced time-height continuity analysis package with long time-series, multi-peak selection and quality control wind calculations to produce and display high quality winds
• Real-time displays of time-series, large FFTs, and all other data products
• Health and status monitor system for full monitoring of radar operations (fully remote controllable)
• Electronically-steered Yagi antenna array with reliable 4-bit PIN diodes for beam pointing anywhere within the cone above the system
• System designed for scalability in transmit power and antenna size for boundary-layer through tropospheric coverage
• Available as an upgrade to existing RWP systems for improved performance & added capability

The DeTect RAPTOR Radar Wind Profiler line was developed to provide unattended real-time operational support for weather forecasting and aviation operations delivering high quality meteorological data products at high temporal resolution with minimal spurious data. The design is open and modern incorporating advanced signal processing, a wide range of data and maintenance displays, non-proprietary acquisition cards, and hardware designed for ease of maintenance.  Systems are built to US and international standards incorporating commercial-off-the shelf (COTS) components where possible to deliver users low acquisition cost, reduced costs of ownership, and ongoing technology insertion and upgrade opportunities over the life of the system.

The nominal transmit frequency for the standard DeTect tropospheric wind profiler is 449 MHz, but this can be tailored to country- and application-specific requirements.  The system utilizes a unique Yagi antenna array, which along with the transmitter, is designed to be scalable so that various models can be derived from a single design to meet customer wind height specifications. Full low frequency (50 to 200 MHz) MST (Mesosphere-Stratosphere-Troposphere) systems as well as higher frequency (915 to 1300 MHz) boundary layer systems are also available.

Download the RAPTOR Radar Wind Profiler technology brochure by Clicking Here (PDF format, requires Adobe Reader; please allow time to download) or email us for a complete catalog on the system.

HARRIER WX Weather Radars:

DeTect's WX weather radar processor is available as a stand alone low cost weather radar system or as add-on functionality to aircraft surveillance, security and bird detection radars delivering multi-functional performance on a single system. HARRIER WX uses DeTect’s reliability-proven S-band radar sensor and is designed to provide high spatial and temporal resolution for weather detection, lightning detection, and rainfall supporting civil and and military airfields, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) operations, environmental research and other applications that require basic weather capabilities with ranges up to 50 nm.

The HARRIER Weather Display software is a multithreaded application for animation of radar weather data generated by the HARRIER weather radar system. As a multithreaded application it can make use of the latest multi core, hyper-threaded or twin/quad processor computers to keep the display updated while the computer conducts other tasks. The display starts automatically when it is launched. The software can be used with real time and recorded raw radar data delivered by the Merlin WX server software.