Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/122908
I INNOVATION Ian Coutts is a freelance writer, author of four books, and a frequent contributor to Vanguard. His writing has appeared in Canadian Business, the Globe and Mail and elsewhere. TRACSHARE: NETWORKING THE MARITIME PICTURE "What we are doing with TracShare is developing a maritime social network." glers, for example, the low-profile, high-speed fiberglass boats familiar to fans of TV's 1980's classic Miami Vice. "The big problem and the big challenge," says Ponsford, "is being able to detect small vessels and objects over a wide area that are a long way from shore." Conventional marine radars are limited in range to line-of-sight, which is about 10 nautical miles for these small craft, so trying to track them using it requires having patrol vessels or aircraft relatively nearby a lot of the time. This sort of "persistent surveillance," as Ponsford terms it, is expensive – prohibitively so. The grand-prize winner of Raytheon's Network Centric Systems 2011 Innovation Challenge, Raytheon Canada's TracShare system combines two pre-existing technologies in a new and novel fashion. Raytheon Canada currently markets a Marine Small Target Tracker (MSTT), which functions as an enhancer for conventional marine radar. MSTT features what might be called an interpretive function, classifying and tracking objects picked up on radar in terms of their speed, size and relative maneuverability and plotting their data onto an electronic chart. This system is used, for example, at the Straits of Gibraltar by Spain's Guardia Civil to keep detailed tabs on ship traffic there. TracShare will take the MSTT to sea. All sea-going vessels have radar running 24/7. And every vessel in the world over 300 tons, and all ships involved in international trade, are equipped with a system known as AIS (AuFlorida Strait. Image: Raytheon Dr. Tony Ponsford's use of "social network" grabs your attention. But what Ponsford, an engineering fellow with Raytheon Canada, is trying to explain isn't some seagoing equivalent of Facebook or Twitter, although it uses similar ideas about decentralized connectivity. Rather it is an ingenious repurposing of existing technologies to help cash- and asset-strapped governments protect their sea coasts. Coast guards, navies and other government organizations such as the United States Department of Homeland Security, face daunting challenges in protecting their coasts. There are a variety of threats – everything from drug smugglers to human traffickers to illegal fishing boats to even potentially seaborne terrorists. Further, many of the craft they need to monitor and intercept are relatively small – so-called "go-fast" boats used by drug smug- 22 APRIL/MAY 2013 www.vanguardcanada.com