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A tricky Blighter!
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13/12/2005
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One of the fundamentals of any design project is ensuring that you have a market for your idea. In some respects, design consultancy Plextek put the cart before the horse when developing Blighter, its ground surveillance radar system.
Mark Radford, Blighter product manager, explained. “About two and a half years ago, the telecomms bubble had burst and we had time on our hands; even the defence industry was hard going. We perceived the need for a cost effective radar system for security applications, but we didn’t know what it was.”
Plextek has traditionally seen its business split fairly evenly between telecoms, defence and ‘other’ – effectively automotive and medical – and many employees come from the defence industry. “We got a group of radar people together and decided to develop a radar. But we didn’t know what it was going to look like,” said Radford.
With essentially a blank sheet of paper, the group could have come up with anything. “But whilst we are good at electronics,” Radford continued, “we’re not so good at the mechanical side of things.” Radar is a competitive market, so the group had to decide where to concentrate its specialised knowledge.
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Author
Graham Pitcher
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