Radar Interference Tracker
Bellingcat's radar interference tracker can be used to locate and monitor active military radar systems.
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Bellingcat's radar interference tracker can be used to locate and monitor active military radar systems.
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The Bellingcat radar interference tracker is a web-based tool that visualises radar interference which can then be used to search for and potentially locate active military radar systems around the globe.
The tool exploits a known flaw in Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery. Systems like Patriot missile batteries emit a radar pulse when turned on that interferes with Sentinel's SAR signal creating a stripe of interference perpendicular to the orbital path of the satellite.
Locations where the tool has suggested radar systems are present according to Ollie Ballinger's include: Russia, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan, Yemen, Dammam, Saudi Arabia, the in New Mexico, USA, and the in Israel.
According to the among other systems the tool has been used to identify:
US MIM-104 Patriot and PAC-2 missile defence systems
Russia surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems in Syria and S-400 SNAR-10M1 radar systems.
Although the RIT tool can help hone in on areas of interest, a manual search of what is underneath a signal is required to identify candidates of the interference.
Features:
Zoom tool: zoom in and out on the map.
Terrain: toggle terrain visualisation on or off
Labels: and toggle labels on satellite imagery off or on.
Search: search by address, general location or latitude and longitude.
Radio interference graph: shows dates with spikes representing when the radar source was most active.
Layers: change opacity of layers.
Example Locations:
Dammam, Saudi Arabia
Dimona Radar Facility, Israel
Rostov-on-Don, Russia
White Sands Missile Range, USA
Kashmir, India/Pakistan Border
Russian Occupied Crimea, Ukraine
The screenshot below show the White Sands Missile Range, USA example included with the radar interference tool.
Web: any modern web browser.
see General Ethical Considerations.
To effectively use the Radar Interference Tracker, especially for beginners or those looking to refine their skills, the following resources are highly recommended:
Official Wiki
Tutorials and Articles
Video Tutorials
Community and Support
Bellingcat Volunteer Team/Unassigned
Other sources of interference: Not every instance of C-band radio frequency interference is caused by a military radar. Weather radar and telecommunications infrastructure among others use the same frequency – all of which are picked up by Sentinel-1, see Ollie Ballinger's .
Processing time: Aggregating by year can be slow according to the .
Data Currency: High resolution satellite imagery is not necessarily current. Although imagery is generally fairly recent, it can be a few years old, see Ollie Ballinger's .
Temporal refresh rates: Sentinel-1 has a five-day revisit time as the satellites circle the globe. However, a with one of the satellites in the constellation has doubled that time.
Facility verification: there could be multiple potential sources (weather, telecommunications, etc.) in the interference stripe, and just because something looks like a military base, it doesn’t mean that it is according to the .
Ballinger, O. (2022) Radar Interference Tracker: A New Open Source Tool to Locate Active Military Radar Systems, bellingcat. Available at: (Accessed: 8 August 2024).
Leng, X., Ji, K. and Kuang, G. (2021) ‘Radio Frequency Interference Detection and Localization in Sentinel-1 Images’, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 59(11), pp. 9270–9281. Available at: .
Radar Interference Tracker within SAR data - Ollie Ballinger (UCL) (2022). Available at: (Accessed: 10 August 2024).
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