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Over the weekend, a new mobile radar appeared at Copenhagen Airport. The radar in question is the mobile version of Weibel's new XENTA M-5 drone radar. The special radar should help with security for the upcoming EU summit, which is taking place in Copenhagen this week.
The day before the radar was transported to the airport, Ingeniøren visited Weibel Scientific's large test site on Zealand, where we had the opportunity to test the very same radar.
Here, Emil Surrow Møller Hansen, technical project manager for XENTA at Weibel Scientific, explains how the radar works and how the mobile solution is designed.
At the end of a 600-metre winding gravel path surrounded by meadows, large beech trees, and a small pond, we park next to two large trucks, each with a container on the back.
The two trucks together carry the mobile version of Weibel Scientific's new radar concept, XENTA, which has been developed specifically to track and classify drones. One container serves as the control room, from which the drones are monitored on a number of large screens.
The second vehicle is about 20 metres away and has a rotating radar on its roof.
The XENTA radar operates using Doppler technology, which is based on continuous waves and provides 100 percent illumination coverage of the target -- in contrast to pulse radars with a very short illumination time.
Large targets, such as commercial aircraft, can be seen up to 150 km away. This is ensured by the heart of the radar: eight microwave transmitters and eight microwave receivers.
The smaller the objects in the sky, the shorter the range.
The drones that have been spotted over a number of Danish airports in recent days, flying under the conventional airport radars, would most likely have been detected by the XENTA radar at a distance of between 30 and 40 km.
"The faster and the further away you can detect an unwanted drone, the more options you have to respond to the threat," says Emil Surrow Møller Hansen, technical project manager for XENTA at Weibel Scientific.
The mobile solution, which is now at Copenhagen Airport, was actually developed for another country in record time. But its departure has now been postponed until after the EU summit.
600 metres from the radar, a drone is launched into the air. Shortly afterwards, it appears on the screen in the control centre.
When the microwaves are transmitted at maximum volume, each transmitter emits at 250 W, which requires the system to be water-cooled. Inside, under the radar, are highly robust graphics cards that perform the initial signal processing before the data is sent on to the control centre.
The drone radar performs two functions. Firstly, the radar can track objects with high precision at long distances.
But it can also provide detailed information about the type of drone in question using new deep learning algorithms.
This feature has been in high demand following the numerous drone incidents over the past week, as it is still unclear what types of drones have been flying over critical Danish infrastructure.
The radar does not just determine whether it is a large bird, a plane, a wind turbine, or a drone. Based on the drone's unique radar signature, Weibel can also determine whether it is a multi-rotor or a fixed-wing drone, and in some cases also identify which specific drone model it is.
XENTA radars are already in use at airports such as Charles de Gaulle and Le Bourget in Paris, Odense on Funen, and in Norway, and before the summer holidays, Weibel Scientific received its largest single order to date for XENTA radars, worth around DKK 500 million. The buyer is Norwegian company Kongsberg, which plans to integrate XENTA into its new short-range air defence system NOMADS, among other things.
XENTA represents a refinement of Weibel's large Doppler radars. In recent years, Weibel Scientific's development department has been working on making the Doppler radar smaller and more mobile.