Peter Wurmsdobler, Aveillant Ltd

Unlike the current generation of air traffic control radar that scan an area using the familiar antenna rotating around a fixed point with a narrow beam, Holographic Radar? continuously transmits pulses in all directions at once and captures the returns in an array of receivers, resulting in a significant amount of data. The combination of an FPGA PCIe adapter and an NVidia GPU in a high performance computer from SuperMicro running GNU/Linux made it technically possible and economically viable to continuously process the captured data in real-time and determine the dynamic characteristics of moving objects within a 3D field of view. The multi-threaded processing chain implemented in C++/Qt is partly run on the GPU and partly on the CPU; it consists of parallel FFTs, beam forming, filtering and classification algorithms that can discriminate wind turbines from aircraft. While wind turbines are suppressed, information about the genuine targets is supplied to air traffic control systems using the ASTERIX standard.