Thales announced the launch of a new naval Radar Electronic Support Measures (R-ESM) solution for multi-purpose ships that need continued capability in the littoral.

Ships sailing close to shore can experience difficulties with radars, due to reflections from the landmass and interference from the greater density of radar traffic.

VIGILE DPX, the latest member of Thales’s VIGILE family of products, addresses this problem through a Wideband Digital Receiver1 that directly samples the full bandwidth of the radar RF spectrum instantaneously.

The ability to receive and process time-coincident signals is critical to providing effective situational awareness and threat warning in the modern, complex RF environment.

VIGILE DPX is a compact and affordable solution that allows the reception and processing of threat signals even in the presence of interfering signals. VIGILE DPX continues to operate in the presence of these emitter types without degradation, providing high-fidelity parametric performance, giving excellent time, frequency and direction finding (DF) accuracies.

As a software defined implementation that uses commercial/off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies, VIGILE DPX provides a high reliability, simple upgradeability and low cost of ownership. It has been proven at sea and is now in service with the Royal Navy as part of the UAT Mod 2 R-ESM solution.

The Wideband Digital Receiver concept used in VIGILE DPX is patented by Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) in the UK and is provided to Thales UK under exclusive license from Ploughshare Innovations Ltd.

Phil Naybour, Head of Thales UK's naval business, said: “VIGILE DPX is a ground-breaking solution, delivering a step change in R-ESM capability. The ability to continue to operate, even in the presence of interferers is critical to any naval force, increasingly so with the trend toward littoral operations. Thales is proud to continue to provide cutting edge technology to the Royal Navy in the UK and excited to see the release of this export variant, VIGILE DPX.”

VIGILE DPX was launched at the ongoing Euronaval in Paris (22-26 October 2012).