Patent ID: 7948426

Claim:
A method of detecting and locating RF emissions weapons, comprising: selecting a geographic region of protection; deploying at least four aircraft to an altitude above commercial airline flight traffic lanes, each aircraft carrying a detection unit having at least an RF weapon detector, a GPS receiver, and a communications unit; wherein the detection unit is programmed to time stamp detected RF weapon pulses and to associate GPS location data with the time of detection; wherein the aircraft are configured to orbit above the geographic region; monitoring data received from each aircraft at a ground station, the data from each aircraft indicating if an RF weapon pulse has been detected, and if so, the data further indicating the time of such detection and the location of the aircraft at that time; using a computer-based analysis unit at the ground station to perform the following steps: to calculate hyperbolic lines of position associated with the data from each aircraft; to use the results of the preceding step and additional data representing the altitude of the aircraft and the terrain of the geographic region to calculate a best point estimate of the location of the RF weapon; to calculate at least one probability containment region around the best point estimate; and to display a map of at least part of the geographic region, the map graphically illustrating the containment region and the best point estimate.