Roke Manor Research

Roke is the research house that turns physics into fielded kit for British government customers. It started in 1956 as Plessey Research Roke Manor, twenty-eight engineers working on military communications from a Victorian manor outside Romsey in Hampshire, and the site is still the centre of the business. Siemens owned it for years, then Chemring Group bought it in 2010, and it has stayed a Chemring subsidiary since. The engineering runs across seven declared areas that the company uses to organise its work: protect and defend, analyse and anticipate, connect and communicate, detect and track, innovate and advance, manoeuvre and effect, and assure and sustain. Customers sit in defence, national security, central government and law enforcement, maritime and commercial markets.

Electromagnetic warfare is the deepest seam. The EM-Vis line covers sensing and attack, and EM-Vis Deceive is a person-borne electronic attack system launched in 2025 that produces targeted non-kinetic effects against adversary communications and small drones, integrated with the VIPER and PREFIX electronic warfare command and control software. Counter-drone work sits next to it. CORTEXA GUARDIAN, revealed at DSEI 2025, is a mast-mounted counter-uncrewed aircraft system pairing radar with a pan-tilt-zoom camera, built so that an ordinary soldier can operate it after days rather than months of training. On the artillery side, the acoustic Hostile Artillery Locating system Roke developed detects and geolocates gun and mortar firings at range, a capability the British Army has used since the Balkans.

Positioning and timing is a second strand. Nav-Sync Pulse is an eLoran receiver and antenna package around fifty-five millimetres across, sold as a way of holding position and time when satellite navigation is jammed or spoofed, and Roke has won government contracts on the back of four decades of eLoran work. The soldier systems side produced CC1, an artificial intelligence enabled tactical end user device built on a hardened smartphone that gives dismounted troops mapping, messaging and decision support at the edge of the network.

Intelligence became a formal business line in 2024 with the acquisition of Bristol-based Geollect, whose maritime geospatial platform ingests hundreds of open source datasets and presents the analysis on a map. That team now sits inside a Roke intelligence-as-a-service unit selling analysis rather than boxes. A separate strand, the Vigil AI classifier developed with the Home Office child abuse image database team, is deployed in forty United Kingdom police forces to detect and categorise illegal imagery, including previously unseen material. Alongside the products, Roke sells consultancy, rapid prototyping, science and research, and long-run technical partnering, which is how most of these systems began. The company is comfortable being the organisation others call when the problem has no product yet.