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

Ministry of Defence A ministry of defence or defense (see American and British English spelling differences#-ce.2C -se, spelling differences), also known as a department of defence or defense, is the part of a government responsible for matters of defence and Mi ...

(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 Northwestern Europe, off the coast of European mainland, the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...

. It was located primarily at Malvern in

Worcestershire Worcestershire ( , ; written abbreviation: Worcs) is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in the West Midlands (region), West Midlands of England. It is bordered by Shropshire, Staffordshire, and the West Midlands (county), West ...

England England is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is located on the island of Great Britain, of which it covers about 62%, and List of islands of England, more than 100 smaller adjacent islands. It ...

. 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 spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

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 Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) was the main United Kingdom research and development organisation for radio navigation, radar, infra-red detection for heat seeking missiles, and related work for the Royal Air Force (RAF) ...

, the

Signals Research and Development Establishment __NOTOC__ The Signals Research and Development Establishment (SRDE) was a British government military research establishment, based in Christchurch, Dorset from 1943 until it merged with the Royal Radar Establishment (RRE) in Malvern, Worcestersh ...

(SRDE) in

Christchurch, Dorset Christchurch () is a town and civil parish on the south coast of Dorset, England. The parish had a population of 31,372 in 2021. It adjoins Bournemouth to the west, with the New Forest to the east. Part of the Historic counties of England, hist ...

, and the Services Electronic Research Laboratory (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 Defford is a small village in the county of Worcestershire, England, located between the towns of Pershore and Upton-upon-Severn. It was once part of the Royal forest of Horewell. The woodlands were mostly removed around the time of the Civil ...

and

Pershore Pershore () is a market town and civil parish in the Wychavon district in Worcestershire, England, on the banks of the River Avon, Warwickshire, River Avon. At the 2011 UK census, census, the population was 7,125. The town is best known for Per ...

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 combined w ...

, 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 QinetiQ ( as in '' kinetic'') is a British defence technology company headquartered in Farnborough, Hampshire. It operates primarily in the defence, security and critical national infrastructure markets and run testing and evaluation capabili ...

, a

commercial Commercial may refer to: * (adjective for) commerce, a system of voluntary exchange of products and services ** (adjective for) trade, the trading of something of economic value such as goods, services, information or money * a dose of advertising ...

company owned by the MoD, and the remainder into the fully government-owned laboratory DSTL. In 2003 the

Carlyle Group The Carlyle Group Inc. is an American multinational company with operations in private equity, alternative asset management and financial services. As of 2023, the company had $426 billion of assets under management. Carlyle specializes in ...

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 system that uses radio waves to determine the distance ('' ranging''), direction ( azimuth and elevation angles), and radial velocity of objects relative to the site. It is a radiodetermination method used to detect and track ...

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 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 im ...

liquid crystal display A liquid-crystal display (LCD) is a flat-panel display or other Electro-optic modulator, electronically modulated optical device that uses the light-modulating properties of liquid crystals combined with polarizers to display information. Liq ...

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 a type of electronic visual display, display that can detect touch input from a user. It consists of both an input device (a touch panel) and an output device (a visual display). The touch panel is typically l ...

. Predecessor organisation

(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 (satellite communications), transponder; it creates a communication channel between a source transmitter and a Rad ...

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 ALGOL 68RS is the second ALGOL 68 compiler written by I. F. Currie and J. D. Morrison, at the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (RSRE). Unlike the earlier ALGOL 68-R, it was designed to be portable, and implemented the language of the Revised ...

(a portable implementation of

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

, following on from

ALGOL 68R ALGOL 68-R was the first implementation of the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 68. In December 1968, the report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 68 was published. On 20–24 July 1970 a working conference was arranged by the International Federation ...

developed by RRE), Coral 66,

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 in ...

s, hierarchical self-organising networks ( deep autoencoders), the

VIPER Vipers are snakes in the family Viperidae, found in most parts of the world, except for Antarctica, Australia, Hawaii, Madagascar, New Zealand, Ireland, and various other isolated islands. They are venomous and have long (relative to non-vipe ...

high-integrity microprocessor, the ELLA 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 communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suite are ...

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

email Electronic mail (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving Digital media, digital messages using electronics, electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the ...

sent by a

head of state A head of state is the public persona of a sovereign state.#Foakes, Foakes, pp. 110–11 "

he head of state He or HE may refer to: Language * He (letter), the fifth letter of the Semitic abjads * He (pronoun), a pronoun in Modern English * He (kana), one of the Japanese kana (へ in hiragana and ヘ in katakana) * Ge (Cyrillic), a Cyrillic letter cal ...

being an embodiment of the State itself or representative of its international persona." The name given to the office of head of sta ...

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 computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the tec ...

by Queen

Elizabeth II Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary; 21 April 19268 September 2022) was Queen of the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth realms from 6 February 1952 until Death and state funeral of Elizabeth II, her death in 2022. ...

on 26 March 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 first version of the Internet Protocol (IP) as a standalone specification. It is one of the core protocols of standards-based internetworking methods in the Internet and other packet-switched networks. ...

addresses.

References

External links

Records of the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment

The National Archives National archives are the archives of a country. The concept evolved in various nations at the dawn of modernity based on the impact of nationalism upon bureaucratic processes of paperwork retention. Conceptual development From the Middle Ages i ...

, 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 communications of 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 British Defence Forces