EADS said Tuesday its new Cassidian radar for the German navy’s F125 class frigates has demonstrated its reconnaissance and surveillance capabilities during tests in the North Sea and Baltic Sea and during factory acceptance tests.
Next year, the first system is planned to be integrated into the Baden-Württemberg-class lead ship.
Image: Cassidian
In two test series of several weeks, the TRS-4D naval radar showed extraordinarily high precision, particularly when detecting small targets such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, guided missiles and periscopes, the company said in a Dec. 17 statement. Subsequently, the customer confirmed the system’s capabilities during the factory acceptance test at Cassidian’s Ulm location.
At the beginning of the test series, which ran for over a year, the radar underwent functional tests on the beach, which were carried out by the Bundeswehr Technical Center No. 71 in Surendorf.
The new radar’s system concept, for the first time, allows the advantages of Active Electronically Scanned Array technology to also be fully exploited for small and medium-sized ships.
The use of multiple independent emitters in its antenna makes this system more accurate and faster than conventional radars, allowing it to tackle a wider-than-ever range of targets, for example, for protection against asymmetric attacks, the statement said. The system architecture is designed so that the radar system’s capabilities can easily be extended through software updates.
For the F125 frigates, the system will be deployed in a version with four fixed arrays. Using electronically controlled beams, these planar arrays are able to track individual targets much more accurately than mechanically rotating antennas, whose update rate depends on their rotational speed. The four F125 frigates of the Baden-Württemberg class should replace the German Navy’s F122 Bremen class ships from 2016.