ERA a.s.

ERA a.s. sells sensors that listen rather than transmit. The company was incorporated in Pardubice in November 1994, formed around engineers who had spent their careers inside Tesla Pardubice building passive radiolocation systems for the Warsaw Pact, and that lineage still defines the product line. Czechoslovak work in this field runs back to the PRP-1 Kopac of 1963, through the KRTP-81 Ramona of 1979 and the KRTP-86 Tamara of 1987, each generation tracking more emitters than the last. ERA has been owned by the Omnipol group since November 2011. Between 500 and 1,000 people work there, and equipment is installed in more than seventy countries. Two divisions carry the business, one aimed at military and security customers and one at civil air traffic management, both built on the same time difference of arrival multilateration core.

The military side is led by VERA-NG, a next generation passive ESM surveillance system introduced in 2017. Receiving stations spread across a baseline measure the arrival time of pulses from radars, transponders, jammers and datalinks, and a central processing station resolves those differences into tracks. Because nothing radiates, the system cannot be located by anti-radiation missiles and does not alert neighbouring states that it is watching them. It handles air, ground and naval emitters, does non-cooperative target identification against a signal library, and is used for counter-UAS detection. Export users have included Estonia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Slovakia, Uganda, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates and the United States. PLESS is the newer over the horizon direction finding sensor, reaching out to several hundred kilometres for long range emitter location. Around those sit LAPDIS for locating and positioning, MIPS for military information processing, EW-DEC for electronic warfare data collection, EW-EDMT for emitter database management and EW-SIM for training crews against synthetic scenarios. ERA has also hosted NATO SET-195 panel work on deployable multiband passive active radar.

Civil air traffic management is the quieter half and pays the bills between defence orders. MSS-5 is the fifth generation multilateration surveillance system, combining wide area multilateration with ADS-B to track transponder equipped aircraft on the airport surface, in terminal areas and en route. NEO is its successor product, certified against EUROCAE ED-117 and feeding advanced surface movement guidance and control systems. SQUID is a small self-contained vehicle transmitter that broadcasts an ADS-B squitter from a GNSS fix, so ground vehicles without transponders appear on the same picture as aircraft. The ERIS family covers communications, data recording and analysis around those installations, and MASTERCARE is the through-life support and maintenance offering. Precision runway monitoring and height monitoring work use the same sensor grid. It is an unusual company in that the civil and military products are genuinely the same technology wearing different labels.