This is one of the key benefits of the RIT tool. The RIT tool has already proven useful in providing clues about potential troop and equipment movement in western Russia where a huge build up of forces has taken place as the prospect of a war with neighbouring Ukraine has become a distinct possibility.įor example, in September last year the RIT detected what appear to be two strong signals near the Russian towns of Pogonovo and Liski. You can access the tool here and its source code here, while a complete guide to using the tool is detailed later in this article. This effectively allows anyone with an internet connection to track when and where certain military radar systems are being deployed. With one click, users can then see whether the radar was turned on at any other point in the past seven years by generating a graph of RFI at that location (as detailed in the below image of a site in Dammam, Saudi Arabia). If a radar is switched on while Sentinel-1 is overhead just once in a given year, the tool will pick it up and display the interference stripe. Yearly aggregates of C-band interference can also be easily calculated and displayed over big areas of interest in a simple and easy to understand manner. The entire earth is a big area to cover and Sentinel-1 takes in a lot of SAR data that would be time consuming to sift through.īuilding on Harel Dan’s initial work and discovery, I have built a tool called the Radar Interference Tracker (RIT) that allows anyone to easily search for Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) from military radars over huge areas and wide time scales. The the Swedish STRIL array captured by Sentinel-1 imagery.īut what if it was possible to look back in time to analyse the potential placement of missile defence systems and other military radars at significant moments, gathering all the relevant Sentinel-1 data across several years and making it easily searchable? He also highlighted other interesting missile battery locations, such as the Swedish STRIL array which acts as the country’s early warning system against Russian aircraft and missiles. All should be detectable when switched on and in view of Sentinel-1.ĭan confirmed the site of the radars he discovered during his initial research by using other open sources such as imagery on Google Maps and even data from the Strava running app. Other military radars that operate on the same C-band frequency include naval radars such as the Japanese FCS-3, the Chinese Type-381 and the Russian S-400 surface-to-air missile system. Patriot missiles are not the only system that create this type of interference. This broadens the search area, but the process of locating the radar by looking at the area under the signal remains the same. Sometimes a radar is only switched on for a short period of time, and interference is only captured at one angle. By stacking these images together (over a month or a year), we can find the source of the RFI where they intersect. Later, the descending satellite also registers RFI in a swath, which becomes bright blue. In the diagram above, the ascending satellite registers Radio Frequency Interference in one of the 250 km by 5 km swaths it imaged, creating a bright red stripe.
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