Australia to host radar conference

Australia will host the International Conference on Radar 2013: Beyond Orthodoxy: New Paradigms in Radar, in Adelaide from 9-12 September.

More than 200 specialists will present and discuss emerging and applied technologies and innovative radar solutions, from aircraft traffic control, electronic protection systems and weather forecasting through to mine safety, personal movement tracking and new automobile collision avoidance technologies.

Conference media spokesperson Dr Don Sinnott says Australia is one of only five countries selected to host the prestigious event. Previous events in the conference’s five-year cycle have been held in China, France, the USA and the UK.  Senior government and scientific delegations from these other host countries will attend the Australian conference.

As radar technologies become ever more pervasive in our everyday lives, the conference program includes a free public lecture on the Tuesday afternoon (10 September) aimed to include community interest groups and senior high school students in a forum on ‘Unlocking the Mysteries of Radar’.

“We’re very pleased to hold the conference in Adelaide, where we have a large centre of gravity in terms of radar professionals,” Dr Sinnott said.

This includes the Coordination Centre for the Jindalee Over the Horizon Radar Network or JORN, the Defence Science & Technology Organisation divisions for Radar, Communications, Surveillance & Reconnaissance, and the Defence Force’s Joint Electronic Warfare Operational Support Unit.

“Despite the adverse economic conditions impacting the world since the conference was last in Adelaide in 2008, radar system activity remains at the forefront of new developments in applied technologies,” Dr Sinnott said, providing examples such as weather forecasting, increased personal safety on roads and in the workplace, new airborne and ground defence capabilities, improved wide area maritime surveillance, and calls for new-generation air traffic control services.

Radar was pioneered in World War II and today encompasses component technologies such as signal processing algorithms, materials science and computational electromagnetics, which Dr Sinnott says have provided an “evolutionary pathway” to ever more efficient means of implementing radar systems.

“Every so often, though, a revolutionary advance will be made, and bringing a group of leaders together in Adelaide can be part of that innovation process,” Dr Sinnott said.

“The conference contributes the lateral thinking needed to fire the imagination of the international radar community.”

Sessions will address the following themes: radar imaging, phenomenology and propagation, HF radar, cross fertilisation/radar marketplace, passive radar, clutter, special applications, mathematical techniques, radar systems, detection and tracking, NCTR and signatures, waveform design and modelling and simulation.