SharpEye™ Technology

Kelvin Hughes has developed SharpEye™ to deliver superior radar performance and reliability, meeting today's challenging situational awareness requirements in both land and sea theatres. SharpEye™ is the world’s first affordable military grade solid state radar sensor offering high reliability and low cost of ownership.

SharpEye™ is a new standard in surveillance missions at sea, onshore and on land. Our surveillance radars range in transmit power size depending on the mission they are used for, from 200 watt to as low as 50 watt peak power. The higher power transceivers are typically deployed in naval navigation and situational awareness radars for capital ship as well as helicopter landing in both I-band (X-band) and E/F-band (S-band) frequencies, where as the lower power SharpEye™ sensors in the range of 50 watts are integrated into our radome product family SharpEye™ SCV for small watercraft and also the BOXER Ground Surveillance Radar product family for man portable, vehicle mounted, and deployable remote and autonomous missions. It is advantageous to achieve superior target discrimination at long range to operate in the I-band (X-band) frequency range.

SharpEye™ technology is the only sensor and fully coherent radar transceiver providing situational awareness in all weather conditions, at sea or on land, in high sea states and ground clutter, day or night.

Key SharpEye™ attributes include long and short range transmission, no ‘lifed’ components requiring routine replacement, low power usage, and high reliability from the commercial-off-the-shelf solid state components (no magnetron). SharpEye™ achieves its superior detection performance by carrying out a large proportion of the processing within the sensor itself and unique Doppler processing enabling more information to be extracted from radar returns.

SharpEye™ uses the Doppler Effect to determine target velocities. This is achieved by processing received echoes into velocity bands, enabling the separation of genuine targets from clutter. Extracting the relative motion of targets by measuring the phase of the received echo relative to the phase of the transmission enables the velocity to be determined; this can only be achieved with a solid state SharpEye™ solution as the transmitter and receiver of the radar must be extremely stable, precluding the use of a magnetron with its inherent instability as well as other less stable radars available.