The Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (RSRE) was a scientific research establishment within the

Ministry of Defence {{unsourced, date=February 2021 A ministry of defence or defense (see spelling differences), also known as a department of defence or defense, is an often-used name for the part of a government responsible for matters of defence, found in state ...

(MoD) of the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and ...

. It was located primarily at Malvern in

Worcestershire Worcestershire ( , ; written abbreviation: Worcs) is a county in the West Midlands of England. The area that is now Worcestershire was absorbed into the unified Kingdom of England in 927, at which time it was constituted as a county (see H ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe ...

. The RSRE motto was ''Ubique Sentio'' (

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...

for "I sense everywhere").

History

RSRE was formed in 1976 by an amalgamation of previous research organizations; these included the Royal Radar Establishment (RRE), itself derived from the World War II-era Telecommunications Research Establishment, the Signals Research and Development Establishment (SRDE) in Christchruch, Dorset, and the

Services Electronic Research Laboratory Service may refer to: Activities * Administrative service, a required part of the workload of university faculty * Civil service, the body of employees of a government * Community service, volunteer service for the benefit of a community or a p ...

(SERL) at Baldock. Beginning in 1979, the SRDE and SERL moved to Malvern to join the RRE's location.Eds
Robert Bud
and Philip Gummett, ''Cold War Hot Science: Applied Research in Britain's Defence Laboratories 1945-1990'', Harwood, 1999 There were several out-stations in

, including the ex- RAF airfields at Defford and Pershore and the satellite tracking station at Sheriffs Lench. In April 1991 RSRE amalgamated with other defence research establishments to form the

Defence Research Agency The Defence Research Agency (DRA) was an executive agency of the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) from April 1991 until April 1995. At the time, the DRA was Britain's largest science and technology organisation. In April 1995, the DRA was combine ...

, which in April 1995 amalgamated with more organisations to form the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency. In June 2001 this became independent of the MoD, with approximately two-thirds of it being incorporated into QinetiQ, a commercial company owned by the MoD, and the remainder into the fully government-owned laboratory

DSTL The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) is an executive agency of the Ministry of Defence of the United Kingdom. Its stated purpose is "to maximise the impact of science and technology for the defence and security of the UK". The ...

. In 2003 the

Carlyle Group The Carlyle Group is a multinational private equity, alternative asset management and financial services corporation based in the United States with $376 billion of assets under management. It specializes in private equity, real assets, and ...

bought a private equity stake (~30%) in QinetiQ.

Research

Some of the most important technologies developed from work at RSRE are

radar Radar is a detection system that uses radio waves to determine the distance (''ranging''), angle, and radial velocity of objects relative to the site. It can be used to detect aircraft, Marine radar, ships, spacecraft, guided missiles, motor v ...

satellite communications A communications satellite is an artificial satellite that relays and amplifies radio telecommunication signals via a transponder; it creates a communication channel between a source transmitter and a receiver at different locations on Earth. ...

thermography Infrared thermography (IRT), thermal video and/or thermal imaging, is a process where a thermal camera captures and creates an image of an object by using infrared radiation emitted from the object in a process, which are examples of infrared i ...

liquid crystal display A liquid-crystal display (LCD) is a flat-panel display or other electronically modulated optical device that uses the light-modulating properties of liquid crystals combined with polarizers. Liquid crystals do not emit light directly but ...

speech synthesis Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal langua ...

and the

Touchscreen A touchscreen or touch screen is the assembly of both an input ('touch panel') and output ('display') device. The touch panel is normally layered on the top of an electronic visual display of an information processing system. The display is ofte ...

. Predecessor organisation Signals Research and Development Establishment (SRDE) had been involved in the development of military

communications satellite A communications satellite is an artificial satellite that relays and amplifies radio telecommunication signals via a transponder; it creates a communication channel between a source transmitter and a receiver at different locations on Earth ...

s, within the U.S. Interim Defense Communication Satellite Program (IDCSP) and the development of the British Skynet 1 and 2 satellite types. The SRDE establishment moved to a RSRE facility at RAF Defford near Malvern in 1980, which had the benefit of flat terrain for good

satellite dish A satellite dish is a dish-shaped type of parabolic antenna designed to receive or transmit information by radio waves to or from a communication satellite. The term most commonly means a dish which receives direct-broadcast satellite televisio ...

positioning and the nearby Bredon Hill for satellite simulators. RSRE was involved in the design and testing of Skynet 4 and its ground facilities and terminals. Contributions to computer science made by the RSRE included ALGOL 68RS (a portable implementation of

ALGOL 68 ALGOL 68 (short for ''Algorithmic Language 1968'') is an imperative programming language that was conceived as a successor to the ALGOL 60 programming language, designed with the goal of a much wider scope of application and more rigorously d ...

, following on from ALGOL 68R developed by

RRE The Royal Radar Establishment was a research centre in Malvern, Worcestershire in the United Kingdom. It was formed in 1953 as the Radar Research Establishment by the merger of the Air Ministry's Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) ...

Coral 66 Corals are marine invertebrates within the class Anthozoa of the phylum Cnidaria. They typically form compact colonies of many identical individual polyps. Coral species include the important reef builders that inhabit tropical oceans and sec ...

radial basis function network In the field of mathematical modeling, a radial basis function network is an artificial neural network that uses radial basis functions as activation functions. The output of the network is a linear combination of radial basis functions of the inp ...

s, hierarchical self-organising networks ( deep autoencoders), the VIPER high-integrity microprocessor, the

ELLA Ella may refer to: * Ella (name), most often a feminine given name, but also used as a surname Places United States * Ella, Kentucky, an unincorporated community * Ella, Oregon, an unincorporated community * Ella, Pennsylvania, an unincorpora ...

hardware description language, and the TenDRA C/C++ compiler. RSRE was an early researcher of

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the su ...

in Europe, along with Peter Kirstein's group at University College London and NDRE in Norway. The first

email Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" mean ...

sent by a

head of state A head of state (or chief of state) is the public persona who officially embodies a state Foakes, pp. 110–11 " he head of statebeing an embodiment of the State itself or representatitve of its international persona." in its unity and ...

was sent from the RSRE over the

ARPANET The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical fou ...

by Queen

Elizabeth II Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary; 21 April 1926 – 8 September 2022) was Queen of the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth realms from 6 February 1952 until her death in 2022. She was queen regnant of 32 sovereign states durin ...

on March 26, 1976. RSRE was allocated class A Internet net 25 in 1979, which later became the Ministry of Defence address space, providing 16.7 million

IPv4 Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) is the fourth version of the Internet Protocol (IP). It is one of the core protocols of standards-based internetworking methods in the Internet and other packet-switched networks. IPv4 was the first version d ...

addresses.

References

External links

Records of the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment

The National Archives National archives are central archives maintained by countries. This article contains a list of national archives. Among its more important tasks are to ensure the accessibility and preservation of the information produced by governments, both ...

, UK
QinetiQ
– the commercial successor of DERA and RSRE
DSTL
– the MOD owned successor of DERA and RSRE {{Authority control 1976 establishments in England 1991 disestablishments in England 20th-century military history of the United Kingdom Buildings and structures in Malvern, Worcestershire Defunct organisations based in the United Kingdom History of electronic engineering History of telecommunications in the United Kingdom Military history of Worcestershire Military research establishments of the United Kingdom Organizations established in 1976 Organizations disestablished in 1991 Radar Research institutes in Worcestershire Malvern, Worcestershire