Welcome to NL-RIA

Mission

The NetherLands knowledge network on Radar Instruments and Applications (acronym NL-RIA) allies scientific and knowledge institutes, companies and governmental agencies to strengthen the international position of The Netherlands in the field of small spaceborne microwave remote sensing instruments, missions and applications.
The network is funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) under a program executed by the Netherlands Space Office (NSO).
Read more about NL-RIA

Members

Currently 19 institutions participate in NL-RIA. See the list of network partners and their expertises.

Join us!

NL-RIA performs low TRL-level research to accomplish its goals. Results of all activities are available to the contributing members through the resources base. The members aim at successful acquisition of projects to raise the TRL-level and strive for capable instruments and missions.
Contact us for more information on membership and cooperation.

Experimental radar test board development for Ka-band altimeter successfully concluded.

In 2022 at the end of the initial NSO funding of NL-RIA a radar test board had been developed by our partner Rfx, for details see this post. The NL-RIA Alticube project that was kicked of in December 2023 gave the opportunity to finalize this test board and test it. …

ESA-OSIP Alticube+ project in its final stage!

In autumn 2023 the ESA OSIP project “Alticube+ – An Aggregated CubeSats Swarm for Long Fixed-baseline Radar Altimetry” started as one of the seven studies selected from around 70 proposals. OSIP stands for Open Space Innovation Platform. This program offers the exploration of new ideas and may lead to activities …

A successful Radar Altimetry shortcourse

Peter Hoogeboom, emeritus professor Radar Remote Sensing of TU Delft gave a shortcourse on radar altimetry to those who were interested and involved in NL-RIA’s activities to realize a constellation of cubesat-based radar altimeters. The course started off with the properties and operating principles of altimeters and gradually deepened into …

KNMI is 18th member of NL-RIA

On 23 November 2022 KNMI joined the NL-RIA knowledge network. Contact person is Ad Stoffelen. Together with colleagues he performs scientific research on the use and performance of spaceborne radar instruments, including windscatterometers and altimeters. KNMI’s membership brings in expertise in this field, which strengthens the user side of NL-RIA. …

New milestone in radar altimeter electronics development

Recently NL-RIA’s partner RFx solutions managed to realize the first radarboard for the 35 GHz miniaturized altimeter. The design is based on work from Ozan Doğan, during his post-doc assignment. The development was sincerely delayed by Covid-19 and by the worldwide shortages in chips. But after a long period of …