Conference Opening 

The Premier of South Australia (Head of elected State Government), Mike Rann, formally launched the conference on the first day of the conference, 3 September. He spoke of the importance of radar and defence technologies in general to Australia and to the State economy. He also made reference to elements of Australia's history in radar and his pleasure at having the continued presence of DSTO's major electronics and information systems research laboratories just north of the State capital. Here it acts as a centre for attracting a good deal of economically valuable defence industry. 

Following Mr Rann's address the conference moved straight into the invited opening plenary address by Prof Hugh Griffiths. 

Abstracts of all papers presented at the conference are given elsewhere on this site. 

Plenary Sessions 

The conference had plenary sessions for the formal opening, an opening address by Prof Hugh Griffiths, plus three other plenary sessions. For the remainder of the conference the technical program ran as three parallel sessions. 

Hugh Griffiths' opening address was titled From a Different Perspective: Principles, Practice and Potential of Bistatic Radar and the content and quality of his presentation, plus the relative novelty of the topic for many, stimulated a great deal of interest among the audience. One programming downside of this intense interest was that a subsequent session on bistatic/multistatic/passive radar drew a standing-room only crowd that overwhelmed the modest size room allocated to that session. A small inconvenience. Dr Mike Wicks featured as a plenary speaker on the topic Radar The Next Generation - Sensors as Robots. This presentation, too, stimulated a good deal of interest. The final plenary speaker was Prof. Yakov Shirman, who spoke on Advantages and Problems of Wideband Radar, giving some unique insights into Soviet radar experience to which he made major contributions over his illustrious career. 

A plenary of a different type was an Industry Panel, featuring a representative of the radar research community (Dr Len Sciacca of DSTO), a representative of the Australian DoD procurement organisation (Mr Mark Reynolds), representatives of two Australian radar manufacturers (Dr Ian Croser of CEA and Mr Laurie Baldwin of Daronmont) and a representative of an international radar firm doing major defence business in Australia (Mr Bill Dovers of Raytheon Australia). 

In this plenary there was some good news and some not so good news for the Australian radar community - the Australian DoD is clearly not into market intervention; small companies battle in this environment but have some unique products that are internationally competitive; there remain significant radar research challenges in addressing uniquely-Australian defence sensing and surveillance needs; and (from Raytheon) the number of radar companies internationally exceeds that needed to meet requirements and further supply-side rationalisation can be expected. 

The general technical program 

The technical program was designed from the outset to have a significant proportion of invited papers. This was a deliberate strategy not only to shape the overall thrust of the program but also to promote a minimum level of participation, given indications of SARS and terrorism-induced reluctance to commit to international travel in the period leading-up to the conference. The invited papers were distributed through the program and three plenary sessions were devoted to "hot" topics. As noted above, these were bistatic radar by Prof. Hugh Griffiths, intelligent, adaptive, networked radar sensors by Dr Mike Wicks, and wideband radar by Professor Yakov Shirman. 

The program was designed to have a strong international flavour but with an emphasis on topics that would appeal to a local audience. A particular feature was a full day session stream devoted to aspects of HF radar covering both skywave and surface-wave modes. This proved to be very popular and is reported separately below. Imaging radar was another major theme running throughout the conference. 

The technical program consisted of three parallel streams made up of 40 invited papers and 62 regular papers in 22 sessions, four plenary sessions (including the industry panel session) and a poster session of 24 papers that, for various reasons, were considered to be more suited to this format. Overall, 163 papers were submitted from 25 countries, of which 138 were accepted. Of this number, 120 were actually presented - nine papers were withdrawn by authors after acceptance and another nine, although programmed, were not presented because authors did not attend. 

HF radar stream of the technical program 

The full-day program on HF radar was coordinated by Dr Stuart Anderson of DSTO, one of the original Jindalee team. Eighteen invited papers were presented during the day, more or less equally divided between HF skywave and HF surface-wave radar, with speakers from Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Italy, Japan, Turkey and the US. Supplementing the technical presentations on 'terrestrial' radars, Dr Massimo Sciotti gave a fascinating account of the MARSIS radar designed to probe the subsurface composition of Mars. 

The specific topics addressed ranged from signal processing techniques to reduce the ionospheric distortion of skywave signals and motion induced smearing of shipborne surface wave radar signals, through HF scattering phenomenology and advanced HF radar applications, to historical perspectives on the evolution of US military and Japanese civilian HF radar systems. As a unique gathering of the international HF radar community, the meeting was an outstanding success and demonstrably achieved its goal of fostering closer collaboration among the various national teams.

Secretariat

Plevin and Associates Pty Ltd PO Box 54 BURNSIDE 5066 South Australia
Tel +61 8 8379 8222 Fax +61 8 8379 8177 events@plevin.com.au

Last updated 01/01/2004