Weather radar for the places the network cannot see.
Low-cost X-band phased-array radar, built to fill the gaps the national network leaves behind — priced so a county, a co-op or a utility can actually buy one.
Low-cost X-band phased-array radar, built to fill the gaps the national network leaves behind — priced so a county, a co-op or a utility can actually buy one.
The national radar network is excellent at what it was built for. It was not built to see into hollows, and it was never going to be dense enough to cover terrain like ours.
A radar a hundred miles away is already looking over your head by the time its beam reaches you — and in the Smokies the ridges take the rest. Put a small radar on the ridge instead and the same storm is in plain view.
Water does not fall where it floods. It falls on the mountains, gathers in creeks that have no floodplain to speak of, and arrives in the valley fast. A farm on a ridge or down a hollow gets no useful warning from a radar beam passing thousands of feet overhead — the first sign is the water.
The people who need that lead time most are the ones the network serves worst: farms outside town, road crews, small municipal utilities, county emergency management offices without a meteorologist on staff. They are not short of forecasts. They are short of a look at what is happening right now, near the ground, on their side of the ridge.
Everything here follows from one constraint: it has to be cheap enough that a county can sign the cheque without a federal grant.
A shorter wavelength gets a narrow beam out of a small antenna. That is what keeps the whole system down to something two people can put up on a ridge, and it is why X-band is the standard choice for filling gaps in a network.
The beam is steered electronically. No motor, no rotating joint, no gearbox, no slip ring — nothing that has to keep turning through a February on an exposed ridge. It also scans faster than a dish can physically move.
The target is a system a county, a co-op or a utility can buy outright — roughly a fourteenth of one national-network radar. Price is not a feature we added at the end; it is the specification everything else was designed against.
A fixed-site, solid-state, electronically steered X-band radar. Figures marked TARGET are design goals for the first production unit, not measured results — we will publish measurements when we have them.
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Band | X-band (9.3–9.5 GHz) |
| Antenna | Electronically steered phased array |
| Moving parts | None |
| Siting | Fixed — tower, rooftop or ridge pad |
| Intended role | Gap filling beneath the national network |
| Transmitter | Solid state TARGET |
| Polarisation | Dual TARGET |
| Products | Reflectivity, radial velocity TARGET |
| System cost | Under $350,000 TARGET |
Lead time on flash flooding in terrain where the national beam is already overhead.
Whether the rain on the ridge is coming down to you, and how fast — before it does.
Where to stage crews tonight, based on what is falling now rather than a regional forecast.
Local, low-level coverage without a federal programme attached to it.
Not a paper company. The boards exist.
Field experience at EWR Radar Systems, which has been building portable X-band weather radar since 1982 and has several hundred systems deployed worldwide. He has worked on these machines where they actually stand, not just where they are designed.
Custom hardware end to end — from board layout through to the physical thing that holds a radar upright on a ridge in the weather. Designs and fabricates the mount, the enclosure and the stand as part of the same job as the electronics.
If you manage a county, a co-op, a utility or a campus and you know exactly which storms you never see coming — we would like to hear about it. That is how the first ones get sited.
hello@knoxradar.com