United States Marine Corps to Deploy Sensis Multilateration System For Wide Area Surveillance at 29 Palms
Air Ground Combat Center

DEWITT, NY - October 31, 2005 - Sensis Corporation announced that the Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center (MCAGCC) is deploying Sensis' Multistatic Dependent Surveillance (MDS) system for advisory air surveillance to provide a high accuracy, high update rate surveillance picture for supporting Joint National Training events and after action reporting. The system's air traffic surveillance will span 965 square miles of airspace at an altitude of 100 to 26,000 feet.

"29 Palms currently relies on procedural control via radio communications and terminal area visual control to track aircraft participating in exercises at MCAGCC," said LtCol Alejandro Rodriguez, Project Officer for Training Systems, Marine Corps Systems Command, United States Marine Corps. "Sensis MDS will provide a single unified picture of all the activity in the 29 Palms airspace."

To address the challenges of the rugged, remote topography with no roads or commercial power, Sensis MDS will be powered by solar energy and employ a wireless communications datalink. In addition to the MDS system, Sensis is providing a Sensor Gateway to provide an aggregate display of other sensors in the area.  The Sensor Gateway provides the interface, track correlation and fuses the tracks from the MDS system, Boron FPS-78B radar, Mt. Laguna ARSR-4 radar and potentially other sensor sources from the Southern California Offshore Range and the Southern California region to provide a single plot level fused target. This fused picture will be distributed from MCAGCC to Department of Defense affiliates such as Joint Forces Command and other training exercise monitors and coordinators.

Sensis MDS, a transponder multilateration system, interacts with an aircraft transponder to determine position and identity. The system uses low-cost, non-rotating sensors to detect and track the movement of aircraft based on their transponder signals. MDS provides accuracy comparable to global positioning systems, a higher update rate than legacy radar systems, and consistent surveillance performance regardless of weather conditions. The precision of the technology will enable the USMC to identify non-military aircraft entering the airspace, reducing the risk of incursions.

"Sensis multilateration technology is highly scalable and adaptable to meet the surveillance and topography requirements of each customer location," said Marc Viggiano, Sensis Air Traffic Systems president. "MCAGCC marks the latest stage in the evolution of uses for Sensis MDS - from ground, to enhanced terminal, to wide area to air surveillance."

Sensis' multilateration technology is operational for enhanced terminal surveillance at Innsbruck Airport (Austria) and is being deployed at Frankfurt Airport (Germany). MDS is also being deployed for wide area multilateration at the Patuxent River Naval Air Station (Maryland). For ground surveillance, MDS is operational at five European airports and is being installed at five additional airports. Further, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration is deploying the Sensis multilateration system to 35 airports as part of the Airport Surface Detection Equipment, Model X program (ASDE-X).