At a ceremony held at the Royal Aeronautical Society’s headquarters, London on Monday evening, representatives from Smith Myers, Biggleswade and Leonardo Helicopter, Yeovil, were presented with the RAeS Team Silver Medal award for their teamwork developing the Redstreak Mobile Phone Detection and Location System.
Previous Silver Team Medallist include The Beagle 2 Mars Mission Engineering Team
A joint Smith Myers and Leonardo Helicopter team brought diverse skills from different domains to engineer an innovative and effective SAR capability.
The team’s vision was to enable a SAR helicopter to have the capability to locate and communicate with a person in distress possessing a standard mobile phone. This system had to work in areas of no cellular network coverage and effectively configure the mobile phone as a rescue beacon.
Leonardo Helicopters experience in airborne system design, development and evaluation together with Smith Myers’ expertise of advanced telecommunications design, produced Redstreak.
Redstreak demonstrated detection ranges of 32km with accuracies of better than 100m. Whilst locating the individual, Redstreak provides both voice and text communications.
Redstreak can locate individuals not detectable by other sensors and large search areas can be covered rapidly. The search is quicker, safer and more effective.
The Redstreak system is used on the AW101 Norwegian All Weather Search and Rescue Helicopter, possibly the most advanced SAR helicopter in the world.
The systems avionics certification covers both rotary and fixed wing aircraft.
Peter Myers managing director of Smith Myers said “Despite the distance between the two sites, the team quickly gelled and rapidly produced flying prototypes. The professionalism and expertise of both companies ensured a well-designed and thoroughly tested system. Redstreak/Artemis gives SAR crews an effective alternative where previously looking out the window was the only option”.
If You Want to Know More
Redstreak (also known as ARTEMIS) is a development of existing designs by Smith Myers, with new location estimation algorithms and redesigned hardware to meet the exacting international standards required by modern avionics on fixed and rotary wind aircraft (DO160G and MilStd 810G).
Smith Myers ARTEMIS has also received recognition from the following:
British Engineering Excellence Award 2017,
Critical Communications Award 2018,
ADS Security Innovation Award 2018.
Smith Myers are a UK SME (30 people) with a 30-year track record of innovative leading edge design, employing the latest radio techniques such as Software Defined Radio and Smart Linear Power Amplifier design. This, in addition to embedded protocol design on the latest Field Programmable Gate Arrays, permitted a radical and effective alternative to traditional direction-finding methods.
The ARTEMIS technology is also available in a smaller package for use on Search and Rescue drones. This system offers the same user interface, but at lower ranges of operation. Used in search scenarios including: coastal paths, cliffs, open sea, avalanche, poor visual conditions etc.
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