Rannoch Corporation, was an American company based in Alexandria, Virginia. It was a research, development and production company working in the field of

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, ships, spacecraft, guided missiles, motor vehicles, w ...

tracking for airport management, ground and airspace control and air defence. Its products included the 'AirScene' Airport Management systems. They had offices worldwide and competed in this market with companies such as: ERA (Czech Republic);

Sensis Corporation Saab Sensis Corporation is a technology company based in East Syracuse, New York and is a subsidiary of Saab Group. Saab Sensis, formerly Sensis Corporation, was acquired by Saab Group in 2011. Following the acquisition, Saab consolidated its U.S. ...

(USA); Park Air Systems AS (Norway); HITT (Netherlands); Lochard (Australia) and

Thales Thales of Miletus ( ; grc-gre, Θαλῆς; ) was a Greek mathematician, astronomer, statesman, and pre-Socratic philosopher from Miletus in Ionia, Asia Minor. He was one of the Seven Sages of Greece. Many, most notably Aristotle, regard ...

(France). In October 2006 Rannoch acquired ERA (6,25 million Euro was provided by an investment company for the acquisition) and moved large part of development and manufacturing to

Pardubice Pardubice (; german: Pardubitz) is a city in the Czech Republic. It has about 89,000 inhabitants. It is the capital city of the Pardubice Region and lies on the Elbe River. The historic centre is well preserved and is protected as an urban monume ...

Czech Republic The Czech Republic, or simply Czechia, is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Historically known as Bohemia, it is bordered by Austria to the south, Germany to the west, Poland to the northeast, and Slovakia to the southeast. Th ...

, location of ERA. In February 2007 Rannoch renamed itself to ''Era Corporation''. In July 2008 ERA was bought by American SRA International for 125.5 million US dollars.SRA's 10K form from 2009
(page 7)

AirScene

The primary mission of their AirScene System is to track all types of aircraft in the air and on an airport surface and

transponder In telecommunications, a transponder is a device that, upon receiving a signal, emits a different signal in response. The term is a blend of ''transmitter'' and ''responder''. In air navigation or radio frequency identification, a flight trans ...

-equipped vehicles to provide a high fidelity, high accuracy, and high update rate air/surface surveillance display. The system receives and decodes signals transmitted by Mode A/C,

Mode S The aviation transponder interrogation modes are the standard formats of pulsed sequences from an interrogating Secondary Surveillance Radar (SSR) or similar Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) system. The reply format is usually refe ...

and ADS-B transponders. The system can be configured so that the sensors are connected to a central processor in real-time, for up-to-the-second track information. Each signal is directly communicated to the central processor where the aircraft/vehicle(s) is/are identified and its/their position calculated in real time (nominally once per second). The remote sensors are designed to be small and compact for easy sitting and installation. Both the

GPS The Global Positioning System (GPS), originally Navstar GPS, is a satellite-based radionavigation system owned by the United States government and operated by the United States Space Force. It is one of the global navigation satellite sy ...

and

L-Band The L band is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) designation for the range of frequencies in the radio spectrum from 1 to 2 gigahertz (GHz). This is at the top end of the ultra high frequency (UHF) band, at the lower en ...

antenna are light and extremely service-friendly allowing them to be installed virtually anywhere and in any environmental condition.

References

Avionics Magazine, June 1, 2001: Will Multilateration Become Mainstream?
discusses Rannoch's AirScene systems.

External links

*(http://www.rannoch.com Rannoch corporate website) (defunct, now points to SRA International) Former defense companies of the United States Defunct engineering companies of the United States Defunct electronics companies of the United States Companies based in Alexandria, Virginia {{aero-company-stub