Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing has announced Advantage-Zeta, a new radar scan converter that combines radar signal acquisition and scan conversion on a single PCI card.
The card supports up to three analog videos inputs, with one video input selected for acquisition. Advantage-Zeta also supports up to 8 digital radar inputs, which may be mixed with the selected analog video. A range of radar input options are also supported, including ACP/ARP, RADDS, serial, and parallel azimuth options.
Advantage-Zeta digitises and processes radar video and turning data for presentation to the radar scan converter. The scan converter creates one or more PPI views of the radar video, providing a high-resolution display up to 1600 x 1200 pixels.
The scan converter next combines the resulting radar picture with a graphics signal from any industry-standard DVI-compatible graphics card. The DVI output from the graphics card becomes an input to Advantage-Zeta, which intelligently mixes the radar video picture with the incoming graphics picture to create a composite, multi-layer display of overlay and underlay graphics, which when blended with the radar video, can drive a DVI or analog RGB monitor.
The card supports range correlation enabling it to sample radar video at up to 50 MHz and reduce down to a programmed return length of 2048 or 4096. Radar PRFs of up to 8 KHz are supported with optional azimuth correlation used to reduce the output data to either 2048 or 4096 azimuths per scan in scanning mode.
The card is designed for use in any standard PCI chassis with motherboard or passive backplane architecture. Since video acquisition and processing are handled entirely on the card, PCI traffic is reduced and consists only of low data rate messages to move radar windows, change view geometry or adjust an operating parameter.
Software support includes drivers for Windows, Solaris and Linux operating environments.
Pricing for the Advantage-Zeta PCI card starts at $8,500 in single unit quantity.
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