The Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (RSRE) was a scientific research establishment within the

Ministry of Defence {{unsourced, date=February 2021 A ministry of defence or defense (see spelling differences), also known as a department of defence or defense, is an often-used name for the part of a government responsible for matters of defence, found in states ...

(MoD) of the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

. It was located primarily at

Malvern Malvern or Malverne may refer to: Places Australia * Malvern, South Australia, a suburb of Adelaide * Malvern, Victoria, a suburb of Melbourne * City of Malvern, a former local government area near Melbourne * Electoral district of Malvern, an e ...

Worcestershire Worcestershire ( , ; written abbreviation: Worcs) is a county in the West Midlands of England. The area that is now Worcestershire was absorbed into the unified Kingdom of England in 927, at which time it was constituted as a county (see His ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

. The RSRE motto was ''Ubique Sentio'' (

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

for "I sense everywhere").

History

RSRE was formed in 1976 by an amalgamation of previous research organizations; these included the

Royal Radar Establishment The Royal Radar Establishment was a research centre in Malvern, Worcestershire in the United Kingdom. It was formed in 1953 as the Radar Research Establishment by the merger of the Air Ministry's Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) a ...

(RRE), itself derived from the World War II-era

Telecommunications Research Establishment The Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) was the main United Kingdom research and development organization for radio navigation, radar, infra-red detection for heat seeking missiles, and related work for the Royal Air Force (RAF) d ...

, the

Signals Research and Development Establishment __NOTOC__ The Signals Research and Development Establishment (SRDE) was a British government military research establishment, based in Christchurch, Dorset from 1943 until it merged with the Royal Radar Establishment (RRE) in Malvern, Worcestersh ...

(SRDE) in Christchruch, Dorset, and the Services Electronic Research Laboratory (SERL) at

Baldock Baldock ( ) is a historic market town and unparished area in the local government district of North Hertfordshire in the county of Hertfordshire, England, where the River Ivel rises. It lies north of London, southeast of Bedford, and north n ...

. Beginning in 1979, the SRDE and SERL moved to Malvern to join the RRE's location.Eds
Robert Bud
and

Philip Gummett Philip John Gummett CBE is a British academic administrator. Philip Gummett graduated from Birmingham University with a B.Sc. in Chemistry in 1969. He graduated from Manchester University with the degrees of M.Sc. and Ph.D. Gummett was Chief Exec ...

, ''Cold War Hot Science: Applied Research in Britain's Defence Laboratories 1945-1990'', Harwood, 1999 There were several out-stations in

, including the ex-

RAF The Royal Air Force (RAF) is the United Kingdom's air and space force. It was formed towards the end of the First World War on 1 April 1918, becoming the first independent air force in the world, by regrouping the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and ...

airfields at

Defford Defford is a small village in the county of Worcestershire, England, located between the towns of Pershore and Upton-upon-Severn. It was once part of the Royal forest of Horewell. The woodlands were mostly removed around the time of the Civil Wa ...

and

Pershore Pershore is a market town in the Wychavon district in Worcestershire, England, on the banks of the River Avon. The town is part of the West Worcestershire parliamentary constituency. At the 2011 census, the population was 7,125. The town is ...

and the satellite tracking station at Sheriffs Lench. In April 1991 RSRE amalgamated with other defence research establishments to form the

Defence Research Agency The Defence Research Agency (DRA) was an executive agency of the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) from April 1991 until April 1995. At the time, the DRA was Britain's largest science and technology organisation. In April 1995, the DRA was combined wi ...

, which in April 1995 amalgamated with more organisations to form the

Defence Evaluation and Research Agency The Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) was a part of the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) between 1995 and 2 July 2001. At the time it was the United Kingdom's largest science and technology organisation. It was regarded by its official h ...

. In June 2001 this became independent of the MoD, with approximately two-thirds of it being incorporated into QinetiQ, a

commercial Commercial may refer to: * a dose of advertising conveyed through media (such as - for example - radio or television) ** Radio advertisement ** Television advertisement * (adjective for:) commerce, a system of voluntary exchange of products and s ...

company owned by the MoD, and the remainder into the fully government-owned laboratory

DSTL The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) is an executive agency of the Ministry of Defence of the United Kingdom. Its stated purpose is "to maximise the impact of science and technology for the defence and security of the UK". The ...

. In 2003 the

Carlyle Group The Carlyle Group is a multinational private equity, alternative asset management and financial services corporation based in the United States with $376 billion of assets under management. It specializes in private equity, real assets, and pri ...

bought a private equity stake (~30%) in QinetiQ.

Research

Some of the most important technologies developed from work at RSRE are

radar Radar is a detection system that uses radio waves to determine the distance (''ranging''), angle, and radial velocity of objects relative to the site. It can be used to detect aircraft, ships, spacecraft, guided missiles, motor vehicles, w ...

satellite communications A communications satellite is an artificial satellite that relays and amplifies radio telecommunication signals via a transponder; it creates a communication channel between a source transmitter and a receiver at different locations on Earth. C ...

thermography Infrared thermography (IRT), thermal video and/or thermal imaging, is a process where a Thermographic camera, thermal camera captures and creates an image of an object by using infrared radiation emitted from the object in a process, which are ...

liquid crystal display A liquid-crystal display (LCD) is a flat panel display, flat-panel display or other Electro-optic modulator, electronically modulated optical device that uses the light-modulating properties of liquid crystals combined with polarizers. Liqui ...

speech synthesis Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal languag ...

and the

Touchscreen A touchscreen or touch screen is the assembly of both an input ('touch panel') and output ('display') device. The touch panel is normally layered on the top of an electronic visual display of an information processing system. The display is often ...

. Predecessor organisation

(SRDE) had been involved in the development of military

communications satellite A communications satellite is an artificial satellite that relays and amplifies radio telecommunication signals via a transponder; it creates a communication channel between a source transmitter and a receiver at different locations on Earth. C ...

s, within the U.S. Interim Defense Communication Satellite Program (IDCSP) and the development of the British Skynet 1 and 2 satellite types. The SRDE establishment moved to a RSRE facility at

RAF Defford Royal Air Force Defford or more simply RAF Defford is a former Royal Air Force station located northwest of Defford, Worcestershire, England. History Second World War At the outbreak of the Second World War, Croome Court and its surrounding ...

near Malvern in 1980, which had the benefit of flat terrain for good

satellite dish A satellite dish is a dish-shaped type of parabolic antenna designed to receive or transmit information by radio waves to or from a communication satellite A communications satellite is an artificial satellite that relays and amplifies radi ...

positioning and the nearby

Bredon Hill Bredon Hill is a hill in Worcestershire, England, south-west of Evesham in the Vale of Evesham. The summit of the hill is in the parish of Kemerton, and it extends over parts of eight other parishes (listed below). The hill is geologically par ...

for satellite simulators. RSRE was involved in the design and testing of Skynet 4 and its ground facilities and terminals. Contributions to computer science made by the RSRE included

ALGOL 68RS ALGOL 68RS is the second ALGOL 68 compiler written by I. F. Currie and J. D. Morrison, at the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (RSRE). Unlike the earlier ALGOL 68-R, it was designed to be portable, and implemented the language of the Revise ...

(a portable implementation of

ALGOL 68 ALGOL 68 (short for ''Algorithmic Language 1968'') is an imperative programming language that was conceived as a successor to the ALGOL 60 programming language, designed with the goal of a much wider scope of application and more rigorously de ...

, following on from

ALGOL 68R ALGOL (; short for "Algorithmic Language") is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in 1958. ALGOL heavily influenced many other languages and was the standard method for algorithm description used by the ...

developed by

RRE The Royal Radar Establishment was a research centre in Malvern, Worcestershire in the United Kingdom. It was formed in 1953 as the Radar Research Establishment by the merger of the Air Ministry's Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) a ...

Coral 66 Corals are marine invertebrates within the class Anthozoa of the phylum Cnidaria. They typically form compact colonies of many identical individual polyps. Coral species include the important reef builders that inhabit tropical oceans and se ...

radial basis function network In the field of mathematical modeling, a radial basis function network is an artificial neural network that uses radial basis functions as activation functions. The output of the network is a linear combination of radial basis functions of the inp ...

s, hierarchical self-organising networks ( deep autoencoders), the

VIPER The Viperidae (vipers) are a family of snakes found in most parts of the world, except for Antarctica, Australia, Hawaii, Madagascar, and various other isolated islands. They are venomous and have long (relative to non-vipers), hinged fangs tha ...

high-integrity microprocessor, the ELLA hardware description language, and the

TenDRA Tendra may refer to: * Gulf (or Bay) of Tendra, Black Sea * Spit (or Island) of Tendra, scene of Russian-Turkish naval battle *Battle of Tendra The Battle of Tendra was a naval action fought on 8 and 9 September 1790 in the Black Sea as part o ...

C/C++ compiler. RSRE was an early researcher of

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suit ...

in Europe, along with Peter Kirstein's group at University College London and NDRE in Norway. The first

email Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...

sent by a

head of state A head of state (or chief of state) is the public persona who officially embodies a state Foakes, pp. 110–11 " he head of statebeing an embodiment of the State itself or representatitve of its international persona." in its unity and l ...

was sent from the RSRE over the

ARPANET The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical fou ...

by Queen

Elizabeth II Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary; 21 April 1926 – 8 September 2022) was Queen of the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth realms from 6 February 1952 until her death in 2022. She was queen regnant of 32 sovereign states during ...

on March 26, 1976. RSRE was allocated class A Internet net 25 in 1979, which later became the Ministry of Defence address space, providing 16.7 million

IPv4 Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) is the fourth version of the Internet Protocol (IP). It is one of the core protocols of standards-based internetworking methods in the Internet and other packet-switched networks. IPv4 was the first version de ...

addresses.

References

External links

Records of the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment

The National Archives National archives are central archives maintained by countries. This article contains a list of national archives. Among its more important tasks are to ensure the accessibility and preservation of the information produced by governments, both ...

, UK
QinetiQ
– the commercial successor of DERA and RSRE
DSTL
– the MOD owned successor of DERA and RSRE {{Authority control 1976 establishments in England 1991 disestablishments in England 20th-century military history of the United Kingdom Buildings and structures in Malvern, Worcestershire Defunct organisations based in the United Kingdom History of electronic engineering History of telecommunications in the United Kingdom Military history of Worcestershire Military research establishments of the United Kingdom Organizations established in 1976 Organizations disestablished in 1991 Radar Research institutes in Worcestershire Malvern, Worcestershire