Hopper: A simulation environment of a radio direction finding system

The rapidly evolving changes in wireless communication technologies increase the importance of radio-monitoring and surveillance. In this article we present a simulation environment for a scalable distributed model for radio-reconnaissance. The Hopper system is designed as a net of geographically distributed bearing units connected to a message-passing network of computers and commanded by a decentralized command unit. The model has been implemented in a portable simulation environment used to develop, test and analyze distributed identification methods based on structure recognition and pattern matching. We present a method that constructs in parallel synthesized pattern signatures by segmentation and that locates emitters by direction area intersections.