For years I, in common with most other sailors, hoisted a traditional passive radar reflector when the fog came in, believing that I would be seen on the radar of the many ships in the waters in which I sailed. After a near miss off Jersey in thick fog in 1999, and the disasters which fell both the Tuila and the Polish Sail Training Yacht Bieszczady costing 13 lives between them, I began to look more closely into the question of my visibility to other vessels.

I was not alone in my doubts. The Maritime Safety Committee of the IMO said, in July 2000, that “there is now strong evidence to indicate that a larger size of reflector with a more uniform polar diagram is required to achieve useable detection ranges in practice, especially at the higher operating frequency of 9GHz and in the presence of severe clutter”, a view which supported the results of the Practical Boat Owner study published in July 1999. It was also significant that most ships, many of which are making well over 20 knots, use radar as their prime vision tool and that most now have ARPA (Automatic Radar Plotting Aid) which only tracks targets which it gathers on at least 50% of scans. Consistency of return was therefore vital.

We felt that an increase in the size of reflectors was undesirable and that we should address the problem of improving our radar visibility from the standpoint of the active Radar Target Enhancer. A few types existed and 2 had been tested in 1997 by the Federal, Maritime and Hydrographic Agency (Germany) which concluded that “Radar Target Enhancers are capable, in principle, of improving safety if reliable energy supply is available.”

It was clear to us that the active Radar Target Enhancer was the solution to the radar visibility problem provided that it met the performance requirements, provided that it could be made small and light enough to fit at the masthead and provided that it could be built for a price which sailors would find acceptable. By adopting an innovative and highly focused approach to our design, we believe that, in Sea-Me, we have achieved these objectives.