Non-Intrusive Radar Traffic Monitoring & Vehicle Classification Station

Overview

The REDCOAST.LTD RC-TMS-700 is a permanent, non-intrusive traffic monitoring and vehicle classification station built for road authorities, toll operators, city traffic departments and transport-planning consultants that need continuous, reliable traffic data without cutting the pavement or closing lanes. A single station mounts at the side of the road and uses dual-beam side-fire radar to measure per-vehicle volume, speed, occupancy, gap, headway and length-based class across every lane in both directions, 24 hours a day, in all weather. The result is trustworthy Average Annual Daily Traffic (AADT), directional and classification data that feeds pavement design, capacity planning, tolling audits and smart-corridor operations — delivered through an open, standards-based interface and a self-hosted or cloud platform.

Key Features

• Non-intrusive dual-beam side-fire radar covering up to 12 discrete lanes bidirectionally, installed in hours with no lane closure and no trenching.
• Per-vehicle metrics: volume, average and 85th-percentile speed, occupancy, gap, headway, vehicle length and length-based classification bins.
• Optional intrusive add-on (inductive loops or piezo/quartz axle strips) for full axle-based FHWA 13-class (Scheme F) and WIM-lite classification where regulations require axle data.
• On-board edge-AI processor performs classification locally and buffers 12+ months of aggregated bins, so data is never lost during a comms outage.
• Continuous automatic-traffic-recorder (ATR) operation, engineered for rain, fog, snow, dust and full darkness with no dependence on ambient light.
• Open data interface: NTCIP 1206, MODBUS TCP, REST/JSON and MQTT, plus SNMP health telemetry, for painless integration with existing ATMS/central systems.
• Self-developed multi-channel radar signal-conditioning board and power-management PCB — the reason REDCOAST.LTD can tune detection, add sensor channels and adapt the station per project.
• Mains-powered with a LiFePO4 UPS for 24–72 h ride-through; solar or wind-solar option for sites without a grid connection.
• Remote OTA firmware, remote re-calibration, GPS/PTP/NTP time sync and tamper/enclosure-open alarms for low-touch fleet operation.
• Web management platform plus mobile app: live per-lane dashboards, historical reports, class distribution, speed profiles and one-click data export (CSV/JSON/TMG-style formats).

Technical Architecture

Each RC-TMS-700 station is organised around four subsystems. The detection head is a low-power FMCW side-fire radar (24 GHz for cost-efficient counting or 77 GHz UHD/4D for higher lane resolution and better wet-weather stability) that forms a virtual speed-trap over each lane. Raw radar returns are digitised and cleaned by REDCOAST.LTD's own multi-channel signal-conditioning board, which also accepts the optional inductive-loop and piezo axle inputs. An edge controller — a quad-core ARM SoC with a neural accelerator — runs the tracking and classification models, aggregates data into user-defined bins (from 20-second to 60-minute intervals) and writes to an industrial local database. A power-management and communications module handles grid/UPS/solar input, surge protection, and the cellular, fibre or Ethernet backhaul.

Data flow is edge-first: the station classifies and stores every vehicle locally, then pushes aggregated bins and health data to the central platform, so bandwidth stays low and a network dropout only delays — never deletes — data. On the platform side, REDCOAST.LTD's web software and mobile app provide fleet status, per-station reports and standards-compliant exports, and can forward records to a customer's central traffic-management system over NTCIP.

Connectivity & Power

For backhaul, the station supports 4G LTE and 5G NR cellular, 10/100/1000 wired Ethernet and fibre (SFP) for instrumented corridors, and NB-IoT or LoRa for auxiliary roadside sensors. Protocol support covers NTCIP 1206, MQTT, MODBUS TCP and SNMP. Power is scenario-driven: on urban arterials, tolling gantries, bridges, tunnels and any site with grid access the station runs on AC 100–240 V mains backed by a LiFePO4 UPS that rides through 24–72 hours of outage; only for genuinely remote, off-grid highway or rural count sites do we specify a solar or wind-solar package sized to local irradiance. Because supply is a configuration and not a fixed part of the product, the same station serves a downtown intersection and a remote interurban corridor.

Protection & Reliability

The radar head is sealed to IP67 and the roadside enclosure to IP55/IP66, with conformal-coated boards, wide-range -40 to +75 °C operation and 5–100 % RH tolerance for salt-fog coastal, high-dust desert and freezing alpine environments. Multi-stage surge protection (up to 10 kA, IEC 61643) guards the mains, signal and comms lines against lightning and switching transients. With no moving parts and solid-state detection, designed MTBF exceeds 60,000 hours and service life is 8–10 years; remote diagnostics, self-test and auto-calibration keep field visits rare. Stations ship pre-calibrated with lane-mapping documentation for fast, repeatable commissioning.

Application Scenarios

• Urban arterial & intersection counts: permanent volume, speed and directional data for signal timing, congestion management and city planning without disrupting traffic.
• Highway mainline AADT stations: continuous automatic-traffic-recorder sites feeding annual traffic statistics, growth-trend analysis and highway asset management.
• Freight & classification corridors: length- or axle-based classification to size pavement, plan freight routes and audit heavy-vehicle flows.
• Toll & managed-lane corroboration: independent volume and classification data alongside tolling gantries for revenue assurance and audit.
• Bridge, tunnel & work-zone monitoring: compact side-fire mounting where in-road loops are impractical, giving live throughput and speed during operations or construction.
• Smart-corridor & sustainability programmes: feeding real-time flow and speed into ATMS, travel-time and low-emission-zone analytics.

Case-style Examples

• Metropolitan arterial count programme (by scenario): a city traffic department replaced dozens of manual tube counts with a network of RC-TMS-700 stations on existing signal poles, gaining year-round per-lane volume, speed and class data while cutting field crews and lane closures dramatically.
• Interurban highway ATR network: a road authority deployed grid-powered stations at permanent count locations along a trunk route, with solar variants at two remote gaps, all reporting AADT and 13-class data into the central traffic-monitoring system over NTCIP.
• Freight-route pavement study: a planning consultant used the piezo axle option to capture full FHWA 13-class and axle-load profiles on a haul corridor, informing pavement rehabilitation design and overload-trend analysis.

Customization & Selection Guide

Choose the radar frequency by need: 24 GHz for budget-sensitive counting on narrower cross-sections, or 77 GHz UHD/4D where you need finer per-lane resolution, more classification bins and best rain performance on wide, multi-lane roads. Add the inductive-loop or piezo module only if your programme mandates axle-based FHWA 13-class or WIM-lite; pure statistics and planning are well served by non-intrusive length classes alone. Pick power by site — grid + UPS for connected locations, solar/wind-solar for off-grid. Match backhaul to the corridor (fibre/Ethernet where conduit exists, 4G/5G otherwise). Cabinet size and mounting (roadside pole, existing streetlight/signal pole, cantilever mast or overhead gantry) are selected from deployment geometry. REDCOAST.LTD will help spec mounting height, offset and lane mapping for your cross-section.

Deployment & After-sales

Side-fire stations mount 5–9 m high with a lateral offset set to the number of lanes; installation needs only pole access, not lane closure or pavement cutting, so a site is typically live the same day. Each unit ships pre-configured and pre-calibrated with a lane-mapping diagram, device IDs and a calibration record. REDCOAST.LTD provides remote commissioning support, OTA updates, a 2–3 year warranty, spare-parts supply and platform/API onboarding, with optional extended maintenance and calibration contracts. Typical project lead time is confirmed per order based on quantity and configuration.

Standards & Compliance

Designed to align with NTCIP 1206 (data collection and monitoring device objects) and the FHWA Traffic Monitoring Guide 13-class scheme for data and classification, with the radar band per ETSI EN 302 264 / EN 300 440 or FCC Part 15 as applicable. Hardware targets CE and RoHS, IP67 (radar) / IP55–IP66 (enclosure) per IEC 60529, IEC 61643 surge protection and EN/IEC 61000 EMC. Axle/WIM options can be referenced to ASTM E1318 practice where weight data is collected.

Why REDCOAST.LTD

REDCOAST.LTD is an end-to-end smart-IoT solution provider: we deliver hardware, the web management platform and the mobile app as one integrated system, built and supported by a single team. Crucially, we design our own PCBs and board-level hardware in-house — the radar signal-conditioning board, the multi-channel acquisition front-end and the power-management board are ours — so we can add sensor channels, tune detection for your cross-section, integrate the exact NTCIP objects your central system expects and adapt the station to each project instead of forcing you into a fixed box. Hardware, firmware, platform and app move together, which keeps the whole solution controllable and deeply customizable.

Contact REDCOAST.LTD to scope a permanent traffic monitoring and classification deployment tailored to your corridors, lane counts, power situation and central-system integration.