STANAG 4607: ground moving target indication, translated both ways

A GMTI packet carries dwell segments, each holding target reports produced by a moving platform's radar as it looks at the ground. It describes movement detected in a patch of terrain during a dwell, together with the platform's own position and the mission that produced the data.

The format explicitly places error detection, encryption and physical transmission outside itself, and its implementation guide places sequence numbering, loss detection and channelisation in a multiplexing layer that is also outside the format. There are no start or end of message characters.

That boundary is the reason the adapter takes exactly one packet. There is no socket, no reassembly buffer, no sequence number window and no cache of previous packets, because the standard instructs a reader that those belong elsewhere.

GMTI answers a question no static picture can: what is moving, where, and in which direction, across an area far larger than an imaging sensor can cover at once.

For indications and warning, patterns of vehicular movement are often the earliest observable signal of intent, and they arrive long before identification is possible.

For a decision-support layer the honesty of the mapping matters more than its breadth. A GMTI report is a detection, and treating a sequence of detections as a track is a claim about association that the data itself does not make.

The adapter implements 212 fields, held in machine readable form alongside the written row set, and a test asserts that the two agree in both directions. A field that nobody has made a decision about fails the build rather than being quietly absent.

No target track is ever emitted. The format carries no identifier for a real target anywhere in its core segments: the report index is defined as a count within a dwell and is conditional besides, the dwell index may be reused across segments by the standard's own guide, and it wraps. Associating reports across dwells is what a GMTI tracker does, and the guide sends the reader to the sensor vendor for the rule, so a translator may not invent one.

Each target report therefore becomes one Entity and one detection Event, with a key that ends in positional ordinals whose fragility is stated on the object rather than hidden.

The platform is the one real identity in the format, because each nation is made responsible for its own platforms being uniquely identified. The platform gets the only Track, and each of its samples records which segment it came from and what kind of instant that segment's time actually is, since one is the temporal centre of a dwell and the other is the moment a report was prepared.

The exercise indicator never sets the deployment level synthetic flag, in either direction, agreement included. A simulated indicator against a real declaration is a refusal, a real indicator against a synthetic declaration is a refusal, and the mixed value contradicts neither and is parked visibly.

Egress re-emits packets from the parsed values.