Radar Interference Tracker: A New Open Source Tool to Locate Active Military Radar Systems

[Nevilledog]

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Bellingcat
@bellingcat
The Radar Interference Tracker (RIT) is a new tool that allows anyone to search for active military radar systems

It has already proven useful in spotting potential movement of military equipment near Russia’s border with Ukraine – as @oballinger explains

bellingcat.com
Radar Interference Tracker: A New Open Source Tool to Locate Active Military Radar Systems -...
Many military radars interfere with open source satellite imagery when they're turned on. A new tool lets anyone monitor when and where these radars are deployed.
1:33 PM · Feb 11, 2022

https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/2022/02/11/radar-interference-tracker-a-new-open-source-tool-to-locate-active-military-radar-systems/

Editor’s note: The Radar Interference Tracker (RIT) is a new tool created by Ollie Ballinger that allows anyone to search for and potentially locate active military radar systems anywhere on earth. Click here to access the tool and read on for a full description of how to use it (as well as learning about the fascinating research it builds upon). The Bellingcat Investigative Tech team has also published the source code for the RIT tool on it on its Github page.

In 2018, Israeli geospatial engineer Harel Dan made a startling discovery.

When looking through Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery captured by the Sentinel-1 satellites, he noticed strong interference patterns over much of the Middle East.

As Dan explained in this blog post, he had intended to filter out the background noise that is commonly picked up by Sentinel-1 but accidentally maximised rather than minimised the settings that capture such interference.

He noticed a strange pattern in the resulting image.

An interference pattern detected by Sentinel-1.

This small error and intriguing picture would come to prove fruitful for open source enthusiasts.

Further research confirmed that much of this interference was being caused by operational missile defence systems, such as the MIM-104 Patriot PAC-2, that were spread across Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan, Israel, Yemen and beyond.

And it was all visible, it transpired, on publicly available satellite imagery.

*snip*