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Filling the gap: mobile aerostats for defence surveillance
Why bases and borders need sensors held high for long periods, where masts, drones and imported aerostats fall short, and what we are building instead.
Saurabh Chalke, Co-founder and CTO
2 min read
A forward base, a border post and a temporary camp share one problem. What they need to see often flies low, behind ridges, trees and buildings, and the sensors meant to see it sit on the ground.
What is available today
Ground radar and cameras stop at the first ridge. A mast helps, but most stop near 40 m and cannot move with the unit. A drone gets higher, then comes down within the hour to change batteries, and a tethered drone stays low. Aircraft and satellites see far, but they cannot stay over one site all day, and a site cannot call on them when it needs to.
Why height on a tether
An aerostat holds a sensor high for long periods, and nothing burns fuel to keep it there. Its tether can carry power up and data down. From 2 km up, the radio horizon to a target on the ground is about 185 km. That is a ceiling, not a detection range. What a radar actually detects depends on the radar, the target and the weather.
Aerostats are not new. Large ones have watched borders for decades. Most are imported, and launching and recovering them takes a large crew, so few sites can have one.
What we are building
A smaller aerostat, with a ground station that launches, recovers, docks and services it. A site should not need a handling crew standing by. We plan two sizes: a fixed version on a prepared pad, and a trailer version for temporary sites. One open payload interface carries mounting, power, data and time, so a site's own radar, cameras or radios can fly.
We are building it in stages. The autonomous aerostat demonstrator is in field testing in Bengaluru and has completed over 100 autonomous launch-and-recovery cycles. The larger aerostat that early warning needs, at a few kilometres, is a later stage.
What we will publish
Detection ranges, uptime and crew numbers, once they are measured, with the conditions they were measured under. Each stage also needs airspace, spectrum and safety approval before it flies. The early-warning page shows the line-of-sight geometry, and the roadmap shows where we are.
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