Missile Technology Control Regime Updated

The US Bureau of industry this week finalized its all encompassing embargo on metals and alloys that it says are used in producing missiles or propellants.

MTCR - April 2010

The new list includes fine metal powders of Zirconium, Tungsten and Beryllium. Tungsten in alloy or elemental form features heavily, due to properties which make it; among other things, suitable for making long range missiles.

Banned Technology

The BIS (Bureau of industry and security) has updated its vast list of embargoed technologies this month. Well over 200 items including ethnicity specific viruses, torture devices and spacecraft have been added.

BIS also maintains a list of denied persons, or people who within non-restricted countries are also banned from purchasing items on the list. You are likely to be pulled yourself if you display any of the 'Red Flag Indicators'

The announcement should raise concerns over transparency and openness. Computers and cameras which are multi-use are also included on the EAR list.

|Here|

Any fiction writer would have a field day with this list. I've cherry picked a few just to give you an idea:

Exploding bridge wire (EBW) detonators
Fireworks displays
Frequency hopping development technology
Gas masks
Gold (Au) metal vapor lasers
Graphics accelerators or coprocessors
Lights, search
Optical-electro shutters, Kerr or Pockel cells
Rift Valley fever virus
Robots, radiation hardened
SAW (Surface Acoustic Wave) devices
Spacecraft
Spray cooling thermal management systems (Hiding IED's, tunnels etc)
SQUIDs (Superconducting quantum interference devices)
Supercavitating hydrofoils (using gas to reduce surface friction in torpedos etc)
Surface-effect vehicles (see Caspian Sea monster)
Tanks, austenitic stainless steel (heat treated)
Tempest type equipment (like the BBC use)
Thumb screws
Time interval measurement, electronic equipment for (Aerial laser profiling etc)
Torpedo net (cool).

Export restricted countries are:

Afghanistan EAR ITARd
Albania EAR
Armenia EAR
Azerbaijan EAR
Bahrain EAR
Belarus EAR ITAR
Bulgaria EAR
Burma (Myanmar) EAR ITAR OFAC
Cambodia EAR
China EARb ITAR
Cuba EARa,c ITAR OFAC
Cyprus ITARe
Egypt EAR
Estonia EAR
Georgia EAR
Haiti ITAR
India EARb
Indonesia ITARe
Iran EARa,c ITAR OFAC
Iraq EARc ITARd OFAC
Israel EARb
Ivory Coast ITARf
Jordan EAR
Kazakhstan EAR
Kuwait EAR
Kyrgyzstan EAR
Laos EAR
Latvia EAR
Lebanon EAR
Liberia ITAR OFAC
Libya EARa ITAR
Lithuania EAR
Macau EAR
Moldova EAR
Mongolia EAR
N. Korea EARa ITAR OFAC
Oman EAR
Pakistan EARb
Qatar EAR
Romania EAR
Russia EARb
Rwanda EARc ITARd
Saudi Arabia EAR
Sierra Leone ITARd
Somalia ITARf
Sudan EARa ITAR OFAC
Syria EARa ITAR OFAC
Taiwan EAR
Tajikistan EAR
Turkmenistan EAR
Ukraine EAR
United Arab Emirates EAR
Uzbekistan EAR
Vietnam EAR ITAR
Yemen EAR ITARe
Zaire (Congo) ITARd
Zimbabwe OFAC

DIY Thermal Lenses

The problem with glass is that it filters out most of the thermal energy we need to detect people with FLIR devices.

here we can see normal glass preventing wavelengths above 2.7um (2700 nm), which is no good. Were interested in energy much further along, somewhere between 8um and 20um.

There are basically 2 solutions.

A.) Make lenses from exotic materials like germanium (talking $800 min), Silicon, salt or Poly-IR. Or,

B.) Don't use lenses.

Whereas most thermal devices use lenses, we can use mirrors. Mirrors are in many ways better than lenses.



Mirrors are generally lighter and cheaper to produce, and first layer metal mirrors maintain very high reflection efficiencies throughout the electromagnetic spectrum.

I am in the process of making a Parabolic mirror for a BHD with a combined budget of around $15, lens and all.

By covering a glass sphere in Papier-mâché. you can get a pretty decent parabola, which can be chosen for size, gain and focal length.

When mine has dried it will be lined it with thermal blanket material (Aluminized PET) from Dollar Mart and lacquered to ensure environmental stability.

Ill upload make shots when it's all fully tried and tested (read;=: a month)

Well, here you can see the mold, and the thermal blanket material. You can make out the papier mache layer just about.

Bodyheat Detector Project

In the last post we saw how commercial thermal detector and kits were incredibly expensive and complicated. I have simplified the design drasticaly. By halving the number of components it is possible to make your own BHD in an afternoon with components that can be cheaply reclaimed from junk electronics found everywhere.

Here is the new circuit diagram.

And the finished circuit:


By doing away with the comparator and 555 timer the board comes in at 3" by 1". These have been replaced with a variable resistor (which is a little big here, but was chosen cos it has an inbuilt switch) and super bright LED. The LED switches on and off quite sharply at the right voltage, and can be controlled with the variable resistor.

The completed device below measures 9" but this can easily be reduced to 6 or 7 with a bit of trimming and a smaller trimmer.


Here you can see the Pot, Battery, circuit and to the top the PIR sensor it's self.

Tested it out last night and without a lens range is about 8 meters, a lens is therefore vital to increasing range to a more useable level.

Heres the strip board layout, which should also help you cut down planning time.

Homemade Long Range Body Heat Detector

In the process of making a bodyheat detector I found very little information on the web, which is quite surprising, because In many situations these devices are more useful than a flashlight. Police and military services are dependent on thermal technology:



Ones on the net like the Gamefinder series retail for at least $120 and go all the way up to over $350!!!. Even kits sell for $100. Their version is barely portable, fussy and with all the moving parts, is unreliable.

The bodyheat detector is well described here;

The body heat detector detects the presence of black body radiation down to 100 degrees Fahrenheit. All warm blooded organisms both human and animal are therefore easily detected. The device is similar to the infra red detector activated flood lights that have been around for some time. The difference is that this unit is very directional and can detect stationary objects as well as those moving.

...Range of human detection on a cool night is well over 200 meters.

Schematics exist on the web, but at first glance, they appear beyond the range of anyone without a Phd in soldering.


So what to do? Well in fact you can make one, and for less than $15. In my next post, I show you how to make a Bodyheat detector in many ways better than ones costing 1000% more, with potentially unlimited range. Yes over 250 Meters.

Weinbridge Oscillator

That's the audio generator for the BodyHeat detector, well the thermal transfers at least. A simple Sine wave oscillator which uses a filament bulb for stability. the schematics came from here. Credit goes to the author who introduced a variable frequency controll to this circuit. Schematic and created the artwork through Eagle.

Handheld radar - more pictures

It would seem Ground Surveilance Radar has been around since at least the 1980's. here's a Falklands story from the AViate magazine (Summer 2007):

...In those days, our EW fit consisted of the Hand Held Radar Warner Mk2(HWR2), a bit of kit like a large pointy ray gun, which you plugged into the mic-tel of your helmet. You would occasionally get random beeps or squeaks from it, but that was about as far as it went. On this day it suddenly gave a brisk ‘breep!’ Very strange, I thought: that was just like the EW training tapes we had to listen to during ground training. Breep, breep...breep, breep. Crivens I said to myself (being unplugged from the intercom...

a little more here

Portaguard; two thirds ready built!

Advanced Adaptive PIR/Microwave Technology Sensor. (Napco C-100 STLRE)


This sensor combines X Band microwave with Passive Infra Red and operates over a wide arc up to 50 feet.

I picked this one up for £1 at a local rag market (the same one the UK Border Patrol pick up illegal immigrants) in Birmingham; there were a few there last Sunday.

It came in a standard PIR package; the wall-mounted kind you see everywhere, a 12v dc supply powers it (although I managed to get it running on 4AA bats) and it takes about a minute to warm up. Once warmed up it will go for days.

I had a breakthrough with it this morning, managed to locate the pins that tap into the microwave receiver (see pic). Linked them to a set of speakers and it now directly replays every movement as a series of clicks and bleeps, kinda like a bat sounds through a bat detector. I say breakthrough, pointing it out of our third story window produces an incredibly rich soundscape.

First things first, and that is to improve the range, which is about 50 feet now, to a more useful distance of, say, 500 yards or 2-3 football pitches. Next, the PCB needs enclosing.

Portaguard – Hand held Microwave Radar Ground Surveillance System (HMRGSS?)

Found this in, Janes Special forces recognition guide; a hand held device using (doppler) radar to convert movements into sound. Humans produce “zipping” sounds at 300 yards and a car, “rushing” sounds at over 600!

Information is scarce* and the contractor; Wylam Defence Systems-, wont deal with civilian queries, so we can only guess how it works or how to build our own. Hey, that’s the point.

The Portaguard probably works in the X Band of frequencies, 8 to 12 GHz,

A medium-distance, higher-precision range used in professional applications, traffic radars, Military applications, civilian marine applications, weather forecasting. Missile-targeting radars operate in this region. Most Synthetic-aperture radars operate in this frequency range. Nose-mounted aerial radar systems often operate in the X-band and K-band regions.

Notice the word, ‘movement’ in the description; the device only seems able to render moving objects audible.