Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has completed flight testing of a new version of Raytheon‘s [RTN] SeaVue surveillance radar that is capable of detecting and tracking a large number of targets over a wide area and automatically reducing the numbers of targets of interest based on additional information, the company says. Flight testing of the SeaVue XMC (Expanded Mission Capability) maritime and overland surveillance radar aboard CBP’s MQ-9 Predator-B Guardian unmanned aircraft system (UAS) lasted several months and concluded at the end of April, Joe Mansour, director of business development for the Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Systems business within Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems, tells TR2. The Guardian UAS is a maritime variant of the Predator-B, which CBP uses to patrol sections of the nation’s land borders. The SeaVue XMC includes a software algorithm developed by Johns Hopkins Univ. Applied Physics Lab under the Ocean Surveillance Initiative funded by Naval Sea Systems Command. The new radar variant is capable of tracking many targets at once and simultaneously correlating with Automatic Identification System transponders aboard ships and with other information to narrow the target set that operators may need to be concerned about, Mansour says. Anybody that has a need for persistent wide area surveillance to quickly sift through a large number of targets is a potential customer, he says. The XMC is being purchased by CBP for use on their DASH-8 surveillance planes.
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