HAWKEYE 360
APPLICATIONS
HAWKEYE 360 FOR Monitoring aerial, terrestrial and
TRANSPORTATION maritime activities to help support
legitimate transportation activities
ACTIVITY AND
LOGISTICS TRACKING Better efficiencies in transportation systems
come from highly effective global vessel
tracking that satisfies both government and
commercial interests. Organizations must
precisely track vessels across land, sea and
sky – and even locate vessels that don’t want
to be found. HawkEye 360 is developing a new
approach to visualization and information to
achieve this level of tracking.
HawkEye 360 is creating a space-based global
intelligence network based on radio frequency
(RF) detection and mapping technology
and plans to deploy a constellation of small
satellites in low Earth orbit at approximately
1
600 km (383 miles) above the Earth’s
surface to detect, locate and analyze RF
www.HE360.com | © HawkEye 360
signals globally. Once fully operational, the
HawkEye 360 Maritime Domain Awareness
(MDA) service will provide customers with
the ability to detect speed, course and
heading of a variety of vessels as well as
other critical information to help support
legal fishing, shipping and transportation
activity across the globe. It is envisioned
that HawkEye 360’s logistics tracking and
MDA service will be used to:
›› Provide visualization and awareness
unavailable in traditional AIS-collection
technology
›› Independently geolocate a ship’s AIS
broadcast to help validate and identify the
true location of a ship, plane or truck
›› Create customized analytics to satisfy
individualized business needs
 Helping First Responders by identifying and
geolocating distress alerts and providing location
HAWKEYE 360
information to assist with emergencies
FOR EMERGENCY
Minutes matter in an emergency. With HawkEye 360
RESPONSE AND data analytics, Search and Rescue teams will be able to
pinpoint people in distress. HawkEye 360’s technology
SEARCH/RESCUE will collect information from emergency locator
EFFORTS beacons and independently locate those beacons to
account for a damaged GPS receiver or locations with
poor GPS reception. The HawkEye 360 team will work
with First Responders and emergency government
2
agencies to quickly gather critical intelligence and offer
multiple services to support Emergency Response and
Search/Rescue efforts.
Identifying radio frequency interferences to help
ensure spectrum sustainability and security
HAWKEYE 360 FOR
Today’s global communications systems are plagued
COMMUNCATIONS by a variety of interference, both intentional and
INTERFERENCE unintentional. The ability to respond quickly and
efficiently to such interference is often critical to avoid a
DETECTION negative impact to operations and human lives. Existing
methodologies to determine the location and source of
the interference can be expensive to use and generally
take a long time to produce precise location data on the
interference source. HawkEye 360 seeks to improve
this process with its precision geolocation algorithms.
This capability has the potential to increase the global
resiliency and operational efficiency of communications
3
systems with the development of a broadband
monitoring satellite with a high revisit rate and low
latency to combat growing interference issues.
Assisting wireless network users make effective
use of assigned spectrum
HAWKEYE 360
The RF spectrum is a finite resource that is congested,
FOR SPECTRUM
competitive, and contested. Understanding and
MAPPING AND visualizing RF spectrum usage is critical to making
decisions about future spectrum allocations and use.
USE New concepts, such as shared spectrum usage, can
change quickly based on demand and availability.
These types of systems require special tools and
data to efficiently operate in a dynamic spectrum
environment. Emerging tools for managing these
dynamics typically utilize ground-based RF sensing
systems which have very limited range and high
operating costs. They must also be physically present
4
in the location in question. HawkEye 360’s approach
essentially takes that limited ground-sensing system
to orbit. The satellites are designed to collect RF signal
information over an area that is hundreds of miles
in diameter. This will allow services that offer cost-
effective, rapid spectrum usage data.
www.HE360.com | © HawkEye 360
In the chaotic aftermath of a natural disaster such as
a hurricane landfall, one of the necessary tasks is to
establish reliable lines of communications between
First Responders, disaster response agencies,
rescue organizations and the survivors. HawkEye
360’s RF mapping design is being developed to
quickly identify what wireless communications
technology (e.g. radio towers) are still working and
what the available communication mechanisms
are. This is important information for the response
agencies because there may be small populations of
survivors who do not speak the country’s primary
language. These populations tend to utilize specific
radio communications and knowing if that specific
radio tower is still working is key to reaching that
population with essential post-disaster information.
HawkEye 360 spacecraft, once operational, will be
used to survey communications channels in a given
geographical area, providing legitimate signal operators
with the necessary information to identify sources of
communication anomalies. The spacecraft may also be
used to respond to active interference situations through a
customer’s ad-hoc tasking process to detect, characterize,
and locate the new source of interference. Ultimately,
HawkEye 360 is working towards a fully-autonomous
system that will use machine learning techniques to
recognize sources of interference and respond accordingly.
Today, communications owner/operators and regulatory
bodies regularly use interference data, both historic and
new, to inform future communications paths. HawkEye
360’s capabilities, once fully fielded, will bring a new
level of accuracy to their analysis. Given the increasing
contention for access to spectrum, having cost-effective,
precision information will be crucial to efficient use.
HawkEye 360 plans to accomplish this through the
use of the satellites Software Defined Radios (SDR).
Because the satellites can be updated on a regular
basis as technologies change, HawkEye 360 will be
able to efficiently and accurately collect the necessary
information to visualize RF spectrum usage in near
real-time. This data can be used to create one of the
first-ever global spectrum inventory and mapping
processes that will have the ability to provide accurate
and cost-effective utilization data to government
regulators. This tool can help accelerate spectrum
knowledge and enable broader and more rapid
adoption of spectrum sharing policies.
The demand for access to additional spectrum will
continue to grow and HawkEye 360 plans to be there
to support that growth. HawkEye 360’s capabilities are
projected to redefine how governments and industries
view and use the RF spectrum with a cost-effective
approach to precisely mapping spectrum usage. That
knowledge is the key enabler which can bring about a
renaissance in spectrum allocation and use.