The low-UHF band Würzburg radar was the primary ground-based tracking radar for the Wehrmacht's Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine (German Navy) during World War II. Initial development took place before the war and the apparatus entered service in 1940. Eventually, over 4,000 Würzburgs of various models were produced. It took its name from the city of Würzburg in Bavaria.

There were two important models of the system. The first Würzburg was a transportable model that could be folded for transit and then brought into operation quickly after emplacement and levelling. The A models began entering service in May 1940 and saw several updated versions over the next year to improve accuracy, notably the addition of conical scanning in the D model of 1941. The larger Würzburg- (giant) was based on the D model but used a much larger parabolic reflector to further improve resolution at the cost of no longer being mobile.

As one of Germany's primary radars, the British spent considerable effort countering it. This culminated in February 1942 with Operation Biting, in which components of an operational A model were captured. Using information from these components, the Royal Air Force introduced "Window" (chaff) and a series of white noise radar jammers known as "Carpet" to interfere with their operation. Late in the war, the British introduced the first jammers using the more advanced angle deception jamming.

Development

In 1933, Wilhelm Runge, Telefunken's laboratory director, met with Rudolf Kühnhold, the leader of the Kriegsmarine Navy Transmissions Laboratory, who explained his idea of using radio waves for locating targets. Runge was unimpressed and dismissed the idea as utopian. Kühnhold then formed (GEMA) with the owners of Tonographie, developing the Freya and Seetakt systems.

By the spring of 1935, GEMA's successes made it clear to Runge that the idea was workable after all, so he started a crash program at Telefunken to develop radar systems. With Lorenz already making progress on early warning devices, Runge had the Telefunken team concentrate on a short-range gun laying system instead. Management apparently felt it to be as uninteresting as Runge had a year earlier and assigned it a low priority for development.

By the summer of 1935, Runge directed one of his transmitters straight up, with a receiver nearby. A Junkers Ju 52 passing directly overhead generated a strong reflection. By the next summer, he incorporated pulsing and duplexing with a paraboloid reflector into a prototype known as the Darmstadt, which offered a range accuracy of . In 1939, the Würzburg system included the LS180 triode, and a rotating dipole feed, called Quirl, for conical lobe switching. It became the best AA gun-laying radar for the next three to four years, when displaced by 10 cm systems. Several updated versions of Carpet were introduced; Carpet II was the primary UK version while Carpet III was its US-built counterpart.

Operation Bellicose bombed the suspected Würzburg radar factory. The Operation Hydra bombing of Peenemünde did not affect the nearby Giant Würzburg at the Lubmin guidance and control station used for the V-2 rocket.

Post-war use in astronomy

Dutch scientists brought several of the surplus German coastal Würzburg radars to the Radio Transmitting Station in Kootwijk, Netherlands in the early 1950s. There, they were used in experiments important in the development of early radio astronomy, specifically the discovery of the hydrogen line and subsequent mapping of the spiral arms of our Milky Way Galaxy.

German radar equipment including two Würzburg antennas (obtained from RAE Farnborough) was used by Martin Ryle and Derek Vonberg at the Cavendish Laboratory from 1945 to observe sunspots.

Two FuSE 65 Würzburg radars were installed around 1956 at the Ondřejov Observatory in Czechoslovakia. The first radar served until 1994 to measure solar radiation flux, and later was moved to the Military museum Lešany. The second radar was used to measure solar spectrum in range 100-1000 MHz. Later it was used only for occasional experiments.

See also

  • List of World War II electronic warfare equipment
  • German night fighter direction vessel Togo

Notes

References

  • . There is an open source verification for this text on the home page .
  • Radar Development in Germany on the Radar World website
  • The Radar War (PDF) by Gehard Hepcke, translated into English By Hannah Liebmann on the Radar World website
  • MUSEUM "WAALSDORP" - Radio Communication with an antenna built during World War II
  • A captured Würzburg radar unit is used to develop World War II countermeasures.