Microwave Journal
www.microwavejournal.com/articles/1025-raytheon-affordable-agbr-successfully-completes-testing

Raytheon Affordable AGBR Successfully Completes Testing

May 15, 2005

Raytheon Co. Affordable Ground Based Radar (AGBR) successfully completed all planned system performance testing recently. The final milestone is the culmination of more than four years of working with the Marine Corps to find the best solutions, utilizing engineering innovation, development, integration and test activities sponsored by the Office of Naval Research through contracts awarded by the US Marine Corps systems command to address the need for a highly mobile and transportable multi-role radar system for the 21st century. A comprehensive test program conducted during the past six months was recently completed on the AGBR Science and Technology concept demonstrator, satisfying high level exit criteria and successfully demonstrating key performance parameters such as mechanical setup and teardown, rotational stability (at both 30 and 60 RPM), detection sensitivity, range and angular accuracy, power consumption, Doppler performance and dynamic range. The final testing included detection and tracking of calibrated targets in the presence of a variety of simulated discrete and distributed clutter environments. The testing culminated with the successful tracking of a training flight. The jet provided the AGBR a controlled target with inbound and outbound radial (as well as crossing) flight trajectories. The entire AGBR test program was conducted at Raytheon’s Surveillance and Sensors Center located in Sudbury, MA. The Marines envision fielding a multi-purpose radar to perform air surveillance, air defense, ground weapons locating and air traffic control. Currently, those functions are each independently performed by aging legacy radars designed for one single-purpose, using technology that is decades old. The Marine Corps has designated this new development program as G/ATOR (Ground/Air Task Oriented Radar); the award of which is anticipated sometime in 2005, following a full and open industry competition. The successful AGBR test and demonstration program will support the Marine Corps’ anticipated G/ATOR Milestone B Decision.