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Camouflage rocks and sticks such as these, used to conceal sensors and cameras, are produced by McQ.
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A surveillance camera sits in a test area at McQ, which produces a variety of sensors and cameras for surveillance.
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By MICHAEL ZITZ
Despite what some politicians say, a "Great Wall of China" between the U.S. and Mexico would probably be too expensive--and it might not work, anyway.
And deploying large numbers of National Guardsmen and/or soldiers to line up along our borders simply isn't feasible, because the military is already stretched thin.
At the behest of the Department of Homeland Security, McQ, a 50-employee Stafford County defense contractor, is contributing to the development a high-tech border protection system that might not require thousands of miles of costly solid fences or walls.
Michael J. Pitts, director of the Unmanned Aircraft Systems Program Office DHS, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Air and Marine, said yesterday that a high-tech "virtual wall" is being developed that may check the flow of illegal aliens--including drug smugglers and potential terrorists.
Unmanned aircraft systems like the Global Hawk and Predators A and B are already being used to watch the Mexican and Canadian borders, the Gulf of Mexico and the Florida coastline, Pitts said.
Drones like the Predator B are being equipped with sophisticated technology that includes cutting-edge radar systems and cameras that will work in tandem with unattended ground sensors, creating a "virtual wall" that could soon help stop those crossing our borders illegally.
The unmanned aircraft will carry Raytheon's MTS-A EI/OR electro-optical infrared imaging system and Sandia National Laboratories/General Atomics' Lynx high-resolution synthetic-aperture radar and put that to use after being alerted by ground sensors.
DHS is currently reaching out to small companies like McQ for new ideas to make the system work.
In March, Jay M. Cohen, DHS Under Secretary for Science and Technology, announced the selection of 22 small businesses for contracts.
As part of the department's Small Business Innovation Research program McQ received $100,000 for Phase I, which ends this fall, and will involve looking at ways its iScout sensor might be adapted to protect the border.
Phase II would involve up to $750,000, for development of a prototype.
The iScout is a small, low- cost, unattended ground sensor McQ had previously developed for the Army.
The device, which is the size of a deck of cards, is so tiny that McQ President John McQuiddy describes a network of iScouts as "Reese's Pieces," referring to the trail of candy used to catch the extraterrestrial in "E.T." "They talk to each other and they can lead you home," McQuiddy said--"home" meaning a way out of a difficult situation.
It's "smart" enough to distinguish between human beings and animals, and wirelessly beam alerts that could alert a Predator drone to fly in and use its imaging and radar capabilities to pinpoint border violations.
McQ will be adding GPS, significantly improving target detection, reducing power consumption and using solar cells that would provide almost inexhaustible battery life.
The local company is already making sensors for U.S. military use in the Middle East, where they beam warnings about insurgent movements and information about other tactical information, including weather reports to officers in the tactical operations centers, to military headquarter units, to the Pentagon, and back to McQ in Stafford.
The company's unattended ground sensors are even capable of sending an e-mail alert to military and commercial users when intruders are detected.
McQ's Omnisense military sensors can be camouflaged as part of the environment, including rocks and twigs. Commercial sensors can be disguised as fire hydrants and other scenery.
McQ's motto is "Tough sensors for an insensitive planet." And its Omnisense military sensors used in the Middle East are tough enough to be dropped from airplanes without a parachute in order to make it more difficult for the enemy to detect deployment. They bounce, settle in, and start spying on the enemy.
Omnisense devices dropped from cruise missiles just before impact use GPS to tell military officers if they hit their targets with precision.
McQ President John H. McQuiddy, a former Dahlgren engineer who founded the company in 1985, said primitive ground sensors have been used by the military since the 1970s in Vietnam.
"They were dropped on the Ho Chi Minh Trail," McQuiddy said. Called Sonobuoys, "they had microphones originally designed to listen for submarines, but they were being used to detect vehicles," radioing signals to Navy aircraft, he said.
Primitive, but a good idea.
In the 1990s, evolving computer and wireless technologies allowed such sensors to be networked with increasing sophistication for both commercial and military use.
"There's been a leap in capability," said Brian McQuiddy, John McQuiddy's son and McQ's director of customer relations. "There used to be a lot of false alarms." But now the sensors recognize a deer or a bird as being harmless and don't beam warnings. They also don't go off in thunderstorms or rainy weather, which would set earlier sensors off.
"What we brought to the table," Brian McQuiddy said, "is three distinct innovations."
He said those innovations are:
Low power consumption for long operation life
Fusing imagery with detection capabilities so users get a picture to analyze threats
Networking all systems.
John McQuiddy said the current generation of military ground sensors was born around 2000 when the Department of Defense started a program that contracted with McQ through Fort Belvoir.
As part of that program, McQ built the first 200 fully networked sensor prototypes for the Army, which became operational in 2005.
"We took the lead in 2005," McQuiddy said.
The Army already can use the current-generation
McQ also makes sound sensors that Fort A.P. Hill in Caroline County uses to measure sound levels escaping the base during weapons testing. It's one of 24 bases around the country using that technology.
Fort A.P. Hill is also testing other McQ security sensors at the Caroline base.
As a reporter watched, McQ looked in on Fort A.P. Hill live via a ground sensor feed and saw a bird hopping around on the base.
McQuiddy said Fort A.P. Hill paid to have a device installed in the front yard of a Caroline County neighbor who lives miles away but complains about noise from testing.
The 50-employee company recently built a new, state-of-the-art production facility in Spotsylvania County with automated computer testing that triples production capacity near Shannon Airport.
Michael Zitz: 540/374-5408
