Magal in $8 million contract to provide perimeter protection

Published 13 September 2007

Magal’s Perimitrax buried cable intrusion detection system will be deployed around several public facilities in an unnamed country in west Asia

This may be politically awkward, but the Syrians may want to to deploy Magal’s perimeter defense system around some of their military facilities (awkward, becasue Magal is an Israeli company). Three days ago a stealthy and daring Israeli military raid destroyed a Syrian facility for producing and storing nonconventional weapons. Israel took action against the facility, located in north east Syria, after information, obtained by national technical means and in other ways, confirmed that North Korea was shipping nuclear materials and equipment to the facility (the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler writes about some of this intelligence in today’s issue of the WP). Israeli comandos approached the facility in the dead of night and directed laser-guided munitions, delivered from aircraft high above, which destroyed the facility. Eyewitnesses were quoted to say that the only thing left was “a big hole in the ground.”

Now, Magal has just the system to detect people approaching the perimeter of a protected facility, let alone trying to breach the perimeter, and an unnamed country in “west Asia” is buying it. Specifically, one of the wholly owned subsidiaries of Yahud, Israel-based Magal Security Systems (NASDAQ GM: MAGS; TASE: MAGS) has received an order of more than $8 million to install its Perimitrax buried cable intrusion detection system as part of a project to protect several public utility facilities in western Asia. The company will begin installations at the first site, in the fourth quarter of 2007. Magal’s Perimitrax system is a covert perimeter intrusion detection sensor which generates an electromagnetic field around buried sensor cables. If an intruder comes into contact with the field, an alarm is declared. “We are very pleased to announce this order for one of Magal’s premier security solutions,” said Izhar Dekel, CEO of Magal. “This order further attests to our leading position in the security area, while expanding and diversifying our geographic footprint into a new region.”

Sensitive detection systems are susceptible to false alarms (the history of the cold war offers quite a few instances, for example, of flocks of geese being mistaken for Soviet missiles, causing U.S. nuclear forces to go on higher alert). Since Magal’s system is placed on the perimeter, it, too, would have been susceptible to being activated by birds or small animals. Common environmental false-alarm sources such as foliage, rain, snow, and blowing sand are filtered out by Perimitrax’s advanced adaptive algorithms. The company says that this intelligent signal processing provides the highest Probability of Detection (Pd) of any sensor type and a very low False and Nuisance Alarm Rate (FAR/NAR).

Magal Security Systems has been in the buisness of fencing, intrusion detection, monitoring, and perimter defense for a while. It has a subsidiary in the United States — Smart Interactive Systems, located in College Point, New York.