French DGA selected Thales Coast Watcher 100 radars for coastal surveillance.

The French Defence Procurement Agency (DGA) recently selected Thales Coast Watcher 100 radars for the surveillance of its coastal waters near to two of its missile test sites.

The Tales Coast Watcher 100 long-range surface and air coastal surveillance radar (Picture Source: Thales)

Under this contract, Thales is scheduled to deliver two Coast Watcher 100 radars by the end of 2020. One of them will be installed at the DGA missile test range of Mediterranean Sea, while the other one will be installed at the DGA missile test range of the Landes. Through this contract, Thales will also provide through-life support and security maintenance for seven years for both radars.

The Thales Coast Watcher 100 is a high-performance radar that enables optimal detection of small maritime threats in challenging environments such as high-sea states, rain, ... and low-altitude airborne threats. Its missions are to maintain optimal surveillance of the territorial waters and economic exclusive zones, site surveillance (ports, oil & gas platforms, high-value sites such as missile test sites, ...), detection of asymmetric threats and low altitude surveillance.

The Coast Watcher 100 is built around a Modular Solid-State Transmitter permitting high performances and availability. It is associated with a COTS (PC) hardware-based processing allowing the best performance/cost ratio.

The Kinematic Scan To Scan© signal processing technology of the algorithm performs precise filtering of all environmental clutters (including extreme weather conditions), allowing precise small target detection, discrimination and a low false alarm rate. It allows a very small target detection even in a harsh environment (rain, sea-state 5). It simply provides detection, where competitors are blind.

The Coast Watcher family is made of an open-architecture based on COTS elements, leading to a low-cost radar production and universal interfacing with all existing systems in operation today. Moreover, this universal interfacing will allow you to perform an easy integration of your radar in a future larger system you might think of.