360 Vision Technology has been chosen to supply its radar surveillance camera technology to a solar farm site in Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire.

According to the company, it is capable of generating 1-Megawatt of electrical power, the solar farm site was constructed by VARTEC EPC Limited for Lowther Renewables Ltd, to help offset the carbon footprint of its parent company, AJ Lowther & Son Ltd, which provides a range of steelwork, cladding and refurbishment services, including steelwork structures catering for manufacturing, industrial, agricultural, commercial and equestrian buildings.

Facing many challenges

In collaboration with VARTEC, a technical specification for the solar farm was jointly devised by Craig Carton, 360 Vision Technology’s Technical & Customer Support Manager, resulting in the specification of a 360 Vision Predator Radar camera unit specified to secure the entire site.

The 360 Vision Predator Radar camera unit deployed integrates radar technology with a Predator 1080p HD camera, to offer a cost-effective perimeter and wide area surveillance solution, the company says.

With up to 200m radius/400m diameter constant surveillance capability, this provides an effective solution with which to secure the solar farm site, while minimizing costs compared to traditional CCTV camera solutions, with only one radar/camera unit being required.

“The site’s remote countryside location, coupled with its significant slope and numerous access points along its perimeter, presented many challenges,” said Craig Vardy, Managing Director of VARTEC.

“Lowther Renewables required coverage of the entire solar farm and it would normally have required several traditional security cameras to provide adequate surveillance coverage, which would have been prohibitively expensive.

“However, we were able to negate the need to install several surveillance cameras by specifying just one 360 Vision Predator Radar camera unit to cover the same area.”

Predator Radar camera features

Designed for applications where wide area detection and tracking of moving objects is required, Predator Radar works in all-weather scenarios (rain, fog, snow, mist) providing uninterrupted protection by scanning 360° twice every second, to detect and automatically track up to 40 simultaneous objects.

At the site, on detection of an object by the Predator Radar camera, an alarm activation is sent to the NX Witness VMS via an I/O module.

NX Witness sends this alarm onwards to the Sentinel alarm management platform at the Doncaster Security Operations Centre (DSOC), where alarms are prioritised and evidence for the events is retrieved.

This provides the operators with live and recorded video and audio, allowing them to make a quick and accurate decision as to the cause of the alarm.

Operators are guided though pre-defined manual and automated actions, based on the cause, to ensure a rapid response to the situation.

DSOC detects, responds and reports any threat activation in real-time, meaning the solar farm is protected and immediately aware of any security issues.

At DSOC, any Predator Radar camera alarm activations are overlaid on screen to notify the operator that an intruder has been detected and tracking images are automatically sent to the operator’s screen for visual confirmation – all whilst the object is continuously and automatically tracked, whatever its path onsite.

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