Blighter Surveillance Systems

Blighter Surveillance Systems makes ground-based radar that watches wide, empty spaces and picks out things that barely move. Its founding claim, and still the one it leads with, was building the first radar able to reliably detect a crawling person. The technology came out of Plextek, the Cambridge design house, where work on the Blighter radar began around 2003. It was constituted as a separate business in 2013 and spun out of the Plextek Group entirely in 2016. The company operates from Iceni House at Great Chesterford, just south of Cambridge, and its radars are in service in around 50 countries.

The technical distinction is passive electronic scanning. Rather than physically rotating an antenna, Blighter radars steer the beam electronically across a patented PESA array. That removes the moving parts, cuts power draw to levels that suit remote solar and battery sites, and lets the radar dwell on a sector while still covering a wide arc. Blighter has stayed with X and Ku band modules built in house, and markets its products as ITAR free, which is a real commercial argument for customers who would rather not deal with US export licensing on a border project.

Four radar families cover the domains. The B400 series is the ground surveillance workhorse, watching perimeters and open terrain around the clock in all weather. The B422 LR extends that to long-range border surveillance, the case where one sensor has to hold tens of kilometers of frontier with almost no supporting infrastructure. The C400 series is the coastal variant, and its proprietary Sea Clutter Filter is the part the company talks about most, since suppressing wave returns without also suppressing small boats is the entire difficulty of littoral radar. The A400 series handles low, slow aerial targets and is the counter-drone product. The A800 Mk 2 is the multi-mode system, running land, sea and air detection simultaneously from a single head.

Above the hardware sits BlighterNexus. Nexus Track is the tracker written specifically for Blighter sensors, Nexus HMI is the operator display for real-time control and situational awareness, and Nexus Hub aggregates multiple radars and third-party cameras into one mission picture.

The reference deployments are unusually concrete for a company this size. More than a hundred Blighter radars have been fielded by the Republic of Korea Army along the Demilitarised Zone, covering over 250 kilometers of it for more than fifteen years, and Blighter has since signed a Korean value-added reseller agreement to sustain and grow that installed base. B400 series radars have covered the perimeter at London Heathrow. The A400 supplied the detection element of AUDS, the Anti-UAV Defence System developed jointly with Chess Dynamics and Enterprise Control Systems, which pairs the radar with a stabilised electro-optical director and a directional RF inhibitor, and which has been supplied to Ukraine. Blighter radars are also in direct counter-drone use in Ukraine. The company remains small and privately held, selling into border security, coastal surveillance, perimeter protection of critical sites and counter-UAS, usually through systems integrators rather than as a prime.