BLUE OWL CAPABILITY

Blue Owl is a real-time wideband signal surveillance system providing continuous automatic real-time wideband search, detection, collection and analysis of signals of interest in the EM spectrum. The system capabilities are:

• Scalable Wideband Staring
• Fast Scanning
• Direction Finding
• Multiple narrowband channel extraction including demodulation
• Signal Collection and Classification

APPLICATIONS

• Strategic and Tactical Communications Intelligence (COMINT)
• Spectrum Monitoring and Management

PRODUCT FEATURES

• Modular / Scalable system to meet specific surveillance requirements for wideband staring, fast scanning and DF (simultaneous fast scanning and staring operation)
• High performance time domain channeliser extracts multiple narrowband channels from each wideband channel
• First syllable coverage using delayed signal path
• Expandable in bandwidth increments up to the limits of the platform
• Configurable to provide real-time direction finding
• Interfaces to most commercially available tuners, allowing seamless HF, VHF, UHF coverage
• Sophisticated real-time operator graphical user interface
• Client / Server architecture allowing remote deployment and monitoring
• Optional signal classification and strategic analysis tools available
• TCP/IP LAN interfaces to external systems
• Compact rackmount unit (from 1U upwards depending on requirements)
• Ruggedisation option available for harsh environments
• High performance / low price

KEY PRODUCT ADVANTAGES

The modularity inherent to the Blue Owl Architecture allows a wide variety of systems to be easily configured to meet your surveillance needs. Typically tuners and CDPs can be added to increase staring bandwidth, add parallel channels for DF, add fast scanning channels, add narrowband channels etc. The system can be hosted on a wide variety of platforms including PCI, VME and Compact PCI. For VME based systems, tuners can be co-located with the CDPs for a single box solution.

CHANNEL DATA PROCESSOR CONCEPT

The core acquisition and signal processing is all performed on a single card, the Channel Data Processor (CDP). Each card has a capacity defined as follows:

• Acquires and processes two wideband analogue IF input channels (up to 8MHz bandwidth per channel)
• Performs energy detection processing across up to 8MHz bandwidth (per channel) with high frequency resolution (staring - 100% spectral coverage)
• Extracts multiple narrowband channels of time domain data from the wideband channels (Greater than 100 NB channels of 3kHz bandwidth per card, bandwidth selectable)
• Performs direction finding processing (requires min 2 cards)

Additional CDPs can be incorporated to either increase the processing bandwidth without sacrificing resolution or to provide a matched direction finding capability.

PRODUCT PEDIGREE

Product developed and commercialised under licence from research undertaken by the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO)

Completely new architecture, building upon experience gained with the SHRIKE product.