August 2024. EMAG partner Aloft Sensing, Inc. has integrated their X-band radar, comprising an EMAG AESA customized for Aloft’s architecture, into a variety of aerial vehicles, including low flying drones, single-engine aircraft, jet aircraft, and stratospheric platforms. The AESA’s multiple phase centers are digitized by the Aloft software-defined transceiver to provide high-precision localization using patented Aloft techniques. This results in an improvement in radar performance for mapping and surveillance objectives and also provides a reliable source of positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) data as an alternative to GPS/GNSS.
The AESA further supports full electronic beam steerability for flexible and resilient operations and ease of integration. In addition to the PNT capability, Aloft is using the radar sensor to demonstrate exquisitely focused synthetic aperture radar imagery from challenging non-traditional platforms like drones (see figure), as well as lidar-quality terrain mapping, ultra-sensitive change detection, precise moving target indication, and distributed multi-platform coherent mesh radar.
