Radar System for Sunda Strait to Be Complete by 2011

Jakarta Globe, Anita Rachman & Putri Prameshwari, February 13, 2010

Two locally developed radars are expected to be ready by next year to complete a radar array that will monitor sea traffic in the busy Sunda Strait, the Indonesian Institute of Sciences said on Friday.

Mashury Wahab, who is leading the project at the institute, also known as LIPI, said the two new radars would join the first, which was installed last December at Anyer in Banten, as part of the first stage of the Indonesia Sea Radar (ISRA) program.

He said the second radar would be installed at Merak, Banten, between July and August this year, while the third would be set up in South Lampung, near Bakauni Port, next year.

The three radars together will monitor the Sunda Strait and a small part of Sumatra Island.

“In the future, the three radars are expected to give us complete data on the traffic and activities in the area,” Mashury said.

Once the radar array is fully operational, Mashury said data on ship movements from the Sunda Strait to Jakarta’s Tanjung Priok Port could be collected and analyzed by LIPI and related government departments.

LIPI began the ISRA program in March 2009 with the objective of guarding the country’s waters against incursions by foreign ships intent on plundering national resources. It is also hoped to improve rescue response times for maritime accidents.

LIPI is working on the project with the Ministry of Manpower and Transmigration and the Maritime Security Coordination Agency (Bakorkamla).

LIPI chairman Umar Anggara Jenie said ISRA was one of the institute’s main programs and had also been taken up by the new state minister for research and technology, Suharna Surapranata, as a priority program for his first 100 days in office.

Using both local and imported components, the Rp 4 billion ($428,000) radar system is being developed by LIPI’s Research Center for Electronics and Telecommunications in Bandung.

The first radar had a 10-kilometer range, but Mashury said the team planned to extend that to 30 kilometers. The team also hopes to improve the radar array’s effectiveness to not only detect ships, but also to obtain more detailed data such as ship speed.

Mashury said that for the next two radars, the team would use the latest innovations in radar technology. He said that frequency-modulated continuous wave technology, for example, would reduce the size and power consumption of the radars.

The ISRA radars are categorized as “quiet” radars, or low probability intercept, because they do not disturb other radar systems and cannot be detected by radar scanners.

“The next two radars should be lighter. We plan them only being 150 kilograms,” Mashury said, adding that construction of the new radars would cost about Rp 2 billion.

Bambang Ervan, a spokesman for the Ministry of Transportation, said the ISRA would be useful to monitor sea traffic in the region.

An archipelago of more than 17,000 islands, the country still relies heavily on ships, ferries and even wooden fishing boats to move people and cargo.