Hijack! Live imaging for marine boarding parties

05-10-2011

Alan Wood, Managing Director, Wood & Douglas, explains recent developments in portable radio communications for anti-piracy operations at sea.

The Gulf of Aden, funnelling Saudi oil, Chinese IT and Japanese cars from Asia and the Middle East to the European Union, is one of the world's busiest sea lanes, and a prime hunting ground for a new breed of modern day pirate. In November, 2008, piracy made world headlines when the Sirius Star, carrying 2 million barrels of oil, and valued at more than $100 million dollars was seized by Somalis operating out of the pirate city of Eyl. As piracy, hijacking and hostage taking increased during the last decade, major shipping operators have been forced to either bypass the Gulf of Aden, or pay crippling additional "war zone" insurance surcharges to enter these waters.

The risk to international shipping is considerable. According to the ICC International Maritime Bureau (IMB), by late May this year there had been more than 211 attacks on ships worldwide and 24 successful hijackings. More than half of the attacks originated out of Somalia, resulting in 362 hostages being taken, and a further seven killed.

Faced with a growing criminal industry with an annual turnover measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars, it is no surprise that warships from a number of countries are now regularly patrolling the Gulf to protect their shipping interests. Despite this, attacks persist, doubling in number year on year, and increasing in ferocity with pirates regularly armed with automatic weapons and even rockets. The danger to naval crews boarding potential pirate or hijacked vessels is very real.

Prepare to board enemy vessel

One of the most dangerous aspects of dealing with modern piracy is the safe approach to, and boarding of, a suspect vessel, often carried out by a small team aboard a fast rigid inflatable (RIB). For senior naval officers aboard the main patrolling vessel having a clear sight of the boarding party’s approach, direction and status once aboard is critical.  The development of a lightweight, body-worn digital image transmission system is the latest technological innovation in the boarding party’s arsenal.

With a head or a body-worn camera, the new system includes a lightweight integrated encoder and radio transmitter called a dVMo-TP. The dVMo-TP transmitter is a form factor that can easily be carried or worn about the person, needing only a battery power source to operate and provide encoding and transmission of a single video input, two audio inputs and a high speed data stream, fast enough to supply live high quality transmission of video back to the main patrol vessel.

The main vessel receiver uses a widely-spaced diversity antenna system, usually either side of the bridge, each providing an unbroken sweep of more than 180 degrees. Delivering a full 360 degree clear path for transmission, a diversity antenna will compare and assess signal strength before making a smart decision to always take the strongest feed.  This ensures that the best quality images are constantly transmitted, irrelevant to the position or movement of the vessels on the surface. This helps provides excellent reception for boarding and deck inspections at distances up to 2km from the main patrol vessel.

Search and rescue

Securing and inspecting a suspect ship produces a challenge for radio communications, especially if the vessel is a large metal ship or platform. Fading and re-propagation from large metal structures can create ghosting and interference within a video image. By deploying digital transmission these issues start to be addressed; but with modulation applied, the link becomes very resistant to interference. By coding the signal it even becomes possible to use reflection and re-propagation to add to the signal strength, improving, as opposed to decreasing quality of transmission when operating in a complicated or structurally crowded environment

The relay of signal from suspect vessel to patrol craft is further enhanced by deploying a small rugged repeater unit with simple magnet mounted antennas to the deck. Extensive tests on a range of naval vessels and other ships have identified the frequency band to be used to get maximum penetration in steel vessels. This enables live images to be relayed from the team inside the suspect ship, despite the presence of stairs and thick bulkheads.

Two-receiver systems with a common antenna can be provided on the main patrol vessel to give continuous coverage from the boarding and inspection parties. The relay unit is normally on a second frequency for the liaison signal back to the main patrol vessel. Transmission can be encrypted using AES with 256-bit keys and the receivers can have auto-search and lock for pre-selected channels and encryption keys for different operational tasks ensuring the boarding team’s activity can only be viewed and directed by friendly parties.

Whilst the system outlined has been developed primarily for anti piracy, search and hostage rescue applications at sea, the same equipment can easily be redeployed for on-shore searches and vessel protection at sea, with or without the relay system. As the system is designed to be ‘intrinsically safe’ it also lends itself readily to applications within the oil and gas industries.

Last year’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf is a prime example of a situation where portable live video transmission can play a key role. With relevant experts potentially thousands of miles from a developing disaster, it would be a relatively straightforward operation with this system to transmit live video from a deepwater oil or gas platform, via the web, for expert assessment and real-time feedback to non-specialists on the ground. They in turn could deliver immediate, measured, real world responses to alleviate a growing disaster scenario.

Operating in modern maritime theatres is still a potentially high risk activity, but resilient, innovative technology that allows naval and civil personnel to maintain high quality communications, whether audio, but more especially over video channels is making daily operations safer. As long as Somalia remains a lawless state on land, the attacks on international shipping in the waters of the Gulf will continue. Technology, at least, is making inroads into helping the international naval action to reduce and reverse the rate of vessel seizure, hostage taking and resultant loss of life.