Northrop Grumman to Operate VADER Man-Hunting Radar for UAV in Afghanistan

Northrop Grumman to Operate VADER Man-Hunting Radar for Unmanned Aircraft Operations in Afghanistan | UAS VISION

The overall idea of the Vehicle and Dismount Exploitation Radar (VADER) system is to detect teams planting improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to destroy or damage U.S. military vehicles and personnel. VADER also has been demonstrated to track animals and boats. VADER is designed to track vehicles and foot traffic over a wide area from UAS and manned aircraft, and provide Army ground commanders with real-time ground moving target indicator (GMTI) data and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery.

High resolution doppler and coherent processing is needed for both SAR and GMTI. As SANDIA has shown, Successive SAR images can reveal tracks of movement by the use of coherent change detection (CCD), while as reported in Space-time Adaptive Processing for Radar by J. R. Guerci
and Ward and Kogon of Lincoln Labs have reported, GMTI using Space Time Analysis Processing (STAP) can reveal current moving targets with small RCS and slow radial motion component even in high clutter return. 

Sandia GMTI

Sandia SAR CCD

The VADER’s ground moving target indicators detect the Doppler shift that moving objects produce in radar return signals, Northrop Grumman officials say. Doppler shift is a change in the frequency of the radar return caused by the motion of the target. Because there is no shift caused by stationary objects, the shift reveals moving objects.

A Tactical Common Data Link (TCDL) separate from the host platform transmits VADER data to an exploitation ground station with the remote radar control, mission planning, and exploitation equipment. VADER transmits processed signals from the aircraft to custom ground stations, where operators can view still, high-contrast, black-and-white synthetic aperture radar images, or moving targets displayed as dots on a map.

VADER can be operated from a pod mounted on a manned fixed-wing aircraft such as the twin-engine Britten-Norman Islander, on which the company flight-tested VADER in 2008, as well as on the General Atomics MQ-1C Gray Eagle UAS.