Britain's Cambridge Pixel, a developer of primary radar solutions, said it is working with Navtech Radar, a manufacturer of millimeter wave radar sensors and solutions.

As part of the agreement, Cambridge Pixel is supplying its SPx radar tracking and display software for use in a number of specialist security and surveillance radar applications, including situation awareness, perimeter security, highway monitoring and airport surface movement.

Engineers at Navtech Radar's headquarters in Oxfordshire, England, wanted an open and highly flexible software-based radar tracking and display solution to replace its own system. The company was keen to free up resources to focus its development effort on improving the functionality of its commercial millimeter radar sensing solutions, in particular the user interface of its AdvanceGuard and ClearWay products.

"Cambridge Pixel's solution is in a class of its own," said Philip Avery, co-founder and managing director of Navtech Radar. "This partnership gives us access to its SPx radar tracking and display software -- and its engineering team's extensive specialist expertise -- without the burden of carrying the cost of development, maintenance and support in-house.

"Also, the SPx software is open, highly configurable and easy to customize, which is useful given the many different application areas in which we work.

"Having their software engineers as an extension of our own development team is important. To be able to call up, get a quick response and speak directly to someone who actually wrote the code for a particular module and discuss how we might go about customizing it to fit a new application is invaluable -- a rare commodity in today's market," he said.

Cambridge Pixel is supplying Navtech Radar its SPx-based software modules for target tracking and its RadarView software for configuration and maintenance of the radar system.

The SPx target tracking software can be configured for detection and tracking of a wide range of potential targets, including aircraft, trains, vehicles and personnel will receive video from the Navtech radars. Output from the tracker, in the form of track reports with filtered position, speed, heading and statistics, is then delivered into a custom control application across a network interface.

For security applications, tracks may be presented on a situational awareness display with closed circuit TV data, for example.

Since 1999, Navtech Radar has been developing and manufacturing highly effective millimeter wave radar sensor solutions for outdoor commercial applications. MMW radar technology is ideally suited for continuous outdoor use as the radar signal is largely unaffected by rain, fog or dusty atmospheric conditions, the company said.

Navtech Radar's work in this area has led to a series of world first applications, the first driverless straddle carrier operational port in the world; the first quay crane anti-collision safety system using MMW radar on operational cranes; the first operational airport ground surface movement system using MMW radar; the first commercial-off-the-shelf 77GHz MMW radar security system application; the first 77GHz MMW radar installation for highway incident detection and hard shoulder monitoring.

"We are delighted to be working in partnership with a company that is leading the way with millimeter wave radar and boasts so many world firsts," said Richard Warren, director of software, Cambridge Pixel. "Such partnerships really demonstrate the versatility of our solution and the value we add, as engineers, in what is a highly specialist field."

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