Weather radar for the places the network cannot see.
Low-cost X-band phased-array radar, built to fill the gaps the national network leaves behind — priced so a county, a co-op or a utility can actually buy one.
Low-cost X-band phased-array radar, built to fill the gaps the national network leaves behind — priced so a county, a co-op or a utility can actually buy one.
The national radar network is good at what it was built for. It was never built to see into hollows, and there was never going to be enough of it to cover country like ours.
A radar a hundred miles away is already looking over your head by the time its beam reaches you — and in the Smokies the ridges take the rest. Put a small radar on the ridge instead and the same storm is in plain view.
The rain that floods you did not fall on you. It fell up in the mountains, ran into creeks with nowhere to spread out, and got here fast. If you farm on a ridge or live down a hollow, the radar beam is thousands of feet over your head and the first thing you know about the storm is the water.
The people who need that hour most get the worst coverage: farms outside town, road crews, small utilities, county emergency offices with no meteorologist on staff. They do not need another forecast. They need to see what is happening right now, near the ground, on their side of the ridge.
Everything here follows from one constraint: it has to land at a price a county can sign for without a federal grant.
A shorter wavelength gets a narrow beam out of a small antenna. That is what keeps the whole system down to something two people can put up on a ridge, and it is why X-band is the standard choice for filling gaps in a network.
The beam is steered electronically. No motor, no rotating joint, no gearbox, no slip ring — nothing that has to keep turning through a February on an exposed ridge. It also scans faster than a dish can physically move.
The target is a system a county, a co-op or a utility can buy outright — roughly a fourteenth of one national-network radar. That number is not reached by buying a cheaper version of someone else's radar. It is reached by designing the hardware ourselves — our own boards, our own structure, built for this job and nothing else.
A fixed-site, solid-state, electronically steered X-band radar. Figures marked TARGET are design goals for the first production unit, not measured results — we will publish measurements when we have them.
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Band | X-band (9.3–9.5 GHz) |
| Antenna | Electronically steered phased array |
| Moving parts | None |
| Siting | Fixed — tower, rooftop or ridge pad |
| Intended role | Gap filling beneath the national network |
| Transmitter | Solid state TARGET |
| Polarisation | Dual TARGET |
| Products | Reflectivity, radial velocity TARGET |
| System cost | Under $350,000 TARGET |
Lead time on flash flooding in terrain where the national beam is already overhead.
Whether the rain on the ridge is coming down to you, and how fast — before it does.
Where to stage crews tonight, based on what is falling now rather than a regional forecast.
Local, low-level coverage without a federal programme attached to it.
Not a paper company. The boards exist.
Field experience at EWR Radar Systems, which has been building portable X-band weather radar since 1982 and has several hundred systems deployed worldwide. He has worked on these machines where they actually stand, not just where they are designed.
Custom hardware end to end — from board layout through to the physical thing that holds a radar upright on a ridge in the weather. Designs and fabricates the mount, the enclosure and the stand as part of the same job as the electronics.
If you manage a county, a co-op, a utility or a campus and you know exactly which storms you never see coming — we would like to hear about it. That is how the first ones get sited.
simonibuhl@gmail.com