Australia’s Jindalee Radar System Gets Performance Boost

The Alice Springs transmitter at Harts Range
Australia has to choose its defense technology programs carefully. While the country expects to field advanced armed forces, with a population of 24 million it lacks the money and depth of engineering expertise for much domestic development.

But for decades Australia has tirelessly pursued one particularly difficult program: Jindalee, an over-the-horizon radar system that answers the national problem of how to economically monitor the vast maritime approaches of a continent.

With little publicity, the defense department and its contractors have completed a major upgrade of Jindalee, whose three enormous antenna installations, ranged across the Outback, bounce high-frequency radio beams off the ionosphere to observe aircraft and ships at least 3,000 km (1,900 mi.) away, perhaps as far as the South China Sea.

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