A team from MIT Lincoln Laboratory has built and demonstrated wide-band selective propagation radar (WiSPR), a system capable of seeing out various distances at millimeter-wave (mmWave or MMW) frequencies. Typically, these high frequencies, which range from 30 to 300 gigahertz (GHz), are employed for only short-range operations.

Using transmit-and-receive electronically scanned arrays of many antenna elements each, WiSPR produces narrow beams capable of quickly scanning around an area to detect objects of interest. The narrow beams can also be manipulated into broader beams for communications.

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