Roke Manor Research Limited

Founded in 1956, Roke Manor Research Limited is a UK company based at Roke Manor in Romsey, Hampshire. It is a contract research and development business for communications, networks, and electronic sensors. In addition to supporting Chemring, work is also conducted in both the public and private sectors. The company also created Hawk-Eye which is now used widely in sports such as Tennis and Cricket.

Roke has been part of the Chemring Group since 2010, having been initially founded as part of the Plessey company and then subsequently owned for almost 20 years by Siemens.

Company history

• 1956 - Founded as Plessey Research Roke Manor Limited by the Plessey company.^[1] The first managing director was Harold J. Finden, an electrical engineer at Plessey.
• 1990 - Passed to GEC-Siemens AG in a joint takeover.
• 1991 - Became wholly owned by Siemens AG when GEC sold their 50% shareholding to Siemens Plessey Electronic Systems.
• 2010 - Roke was acquired by the Chemring Group PLC.^[2][3]

Technology

• 1960 - Working prototype memory systems developed for the then supercomputer, Atlas.
• 1975 - Designed and developed the World's first monolithic Gallium Arsenide microwave circuit.^[4]
• 1995 - Work began on the Hostile Artillery LOcation system (HALO), an acoustic locator of guns and mortars. HALO was developed to monitor ceasefire violations in the Yugoslav wars, and is in use with the British Army and other nations.^[5]
• 2000 - Won the 2000 Worldaware Innovation Award for work on land mine clearance.^[6]
• 2001 - Developed the Hawk-Eye vision based ball tracking system.^[7][8]

Products

• RESOLVE - an electronic warfare manpack system for the intercept, geolocation and exploitation of tactical communications signals within the HF to SHF bands.^[9] In 2011 RESOLVE won a Queen's Award for Enterprise and Innovation.^[10][11]
• Vigilance - a wide area multilateration system for tracking aircraft. Users include Eurocontrol, in support of RVSM.^[12]
• Miniature Radar Altimeters (MRA) - a range of MRA products primarily designed for use on Airborne Targets and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs).
• Epsilon - a software tool designed to predict the Radar Cross Section (RCS) of a target directly from its geometrical description.
• LOCATE - a suite of integrated products for spectrum monitoring, direction finding, adaptive beamforming and geolocation of HF signals.^[13]

References

External links

• Roke Manor Research Limited