Roke Manor Research

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Roke Manor Research

Company type	Limited Company
Founded	1956
Headquarters	Parent	Chemring Group PLC[2]
Website	roke.co.uk

Roke Manor Research Limited is a British company based at

Roke has been part of the Chemring Group since 2010, having been founded as part of the Plessey company to operate as a dedicated research and development centre, with mass production elsewhere, and later owned for almost 20 years by Siemens where it had a similar research role.

History

• 1956 – Founded as Plessey Research Roke Manor Limited by the Plessey company.^[4] The first managing director was Harold J. Finden, an electrical engineer at Plessey.
• 1990 – Passed to
  Siemens AG
  in a joint takeover.
• 1991 – Became wholly owned by
  GEC
  sold their 50% shareholding to Siemens Plessey Electronic Systems.
• 2010 – Acquired by the Chemring Group PLC.^[5][6]
• 2021 – Roke made its first acquisition since the founding in 1956, acquiring Cubica Technology Ltd. and their holding company Cubica Group.^[7]

Sites

The company's head office is at Roke Manor, Hampshire. It also has facilities in the Barnwood area of Gloucester and at MediaCityUK, Salford, Greater Manchester.^[8]

The Roke Manor site is based around a manor house which dates in part from 1653.^[9] The 22-acre (8.9 ha) grounds had a walled garden, stable block and cottages when bought by Plessey in 1956, and initially these were re-used for laboratory space and meeting rooms, but in various modernization programmes, many of the original buildings have been demolished and much of the grounds covered by purpose-built facilities and car parking. The main house, entrance lodge and walled garden remain.^[10]

Technology timeline

• 1960 – Working prototype memory systems developed for the
  Atlas
  .
• 1975 – Designed and developed the world's first monolithic gallium arsenide microwave circuit.^[11]
• 1995 – Work began on the Hostile Artillery LOcation system (HALO), an
  Yugoslav wars, and is in use with the British Army and other nations.^[12]
• 2000 – Won the 2000 Worldaware Innovation Award for work on land mine clearance.^[13]
• 2001 – Developed the Hawk-Eye vision-based ball tracking system.^[14][15]

Selected products

• RESOLVE – an
  Queen's Award for Enterprise and Innovation.^[17][18]
• Vigilance – a wide area
  RVSM.^[19]
• Miniature Radar Altimeters (MRA) – a range of MRA products primarily designed for use on airborne targets and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).^[20][21]
• Epsilon – a software tool designed to predict the radar cross section (RCS) of a target directly from its geometrical description.
• IRIS – Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) equipment.^[22]
• LOCATE – a suite of products for spectrum monitoring,
  geolocation of HF signals.^[23]
• LOCATE-T – team-based mobile version of the LOCATE system.[24]
• VIPER – electronic warfare planning and data triage.^[25]
• DAMARC – data science in policing.^[26]
• NELSON – driving Royal Navy digitisation.^[27]
• gekko – surface wave sensing.^[28]
• RESOLVE – bespoke lightweight dismounted close quarter Electronic Surveillance pack.^[29]
• HMEWC – High Mobility Electronic Warfare Capability (HMEWC) with integrated Command & Control, Electronic Surveillance and Electronic Attack, capable of operating in complex and contested RF environments.^[30]
• Media Miner.^[31]

References