At Bristol Airport, radar hardware and software is monitoring a Critical Point (CP) within the airport where barriers would not be practical, and where CCTV with manned guarding did not provide a satisfactory response time. The installed product is AdvanceGuard Radar from Navtech Radar with witness2 intelligent software for processing and control.
Chris Ware, Head of Security at Bristol Airport says: “We selected AdvanceGuard based on its all-weather capabilities and operational experience at other airports. A further major factor was that the solution demonstrated the lowest false alarm rate which was demonstrated during testing. We have a lot of fog in Bristol and it was critical that the new solution could cope with that, as well as rain and snow. The AdvanceGuard solution also gives us superior track and trace capability in comparison to other types of technology solutions we looked at. To date, the system has met all our expectations. I would like to highlight that the benefits also include automatic tracking capability and rule-and zone setting flexibility within the witness2 software suite. The system’s alarm log and operator acknowledgement features also provide an audit trail for both employer and employee. Hence, staff can be seen to have followed procedures because there is now a security system in place that documents that they have done so.”
To cover of the CP and its approaches, Navtech specified 360 degree scanning radar sensor – the AdvanceGuard AGS800-X. This unit will scan 360 degrees every second to a radius of 600m with a resolution of 25to 50cm and is capable of detecting vehicles, humans and animals in all weather the makers say. The product is housed in a IP67-compliant enclosure.
The Somerset airport established a warning area around the unsecured CP so that any encroachment by potential intruders results in an alert to operators. All potential threats within the warning area are displayed on the Sentinel user interface and are updated in real-time. Running on top of this, a set of direction rules, with geo-fenced alarm zones, allows witness2 to generate alerts only when a threat moves into the CP from particular directions.
For visual identification in case of incidents, the radar product is integrated with the CCTV at Bristol directing an Esprit TI thermal imaging camera from Pelco.
