WASHINGTON – The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) completed the installation of the Flexible Distributed Array Radar (FlexDAR) earlier this year and began demonstrations with nodes operating at the NRL Chesapeake Bay Detachment in Maryland and at the NASA Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
The FlexDAR concept was conceived by NRL to demonstrate new and advanced capabilities enabled by the implementation of every-element digital beamforming (EEDBF) antenna arrays combined with network coordination and precise time synchronization. EEDBF is an emerging technology that provides a huge leap in antenna capabilities that, when combined with network coordination and precise time synchronization, enables new and advanced radar capabilities. This, along with flexible digital processing, offers a number of attractive features well beyond the capabilities of conventional arrays and radar systems.