SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. 9 June 2012. The U.S. Army is seeking to replace legacy radars at many different test ranges. They found their solution in a General Dynamics C4 Systems-led team.
After four decades of service, the radars at several locations are experiencing decreased reliability and require a large, highly-skilled work force to operate and maintain them. To keep pace with test requirements and overcome obsolescence, the ranges used limited funds to make sporadic modifications and upgrades over the years. In spite of these modifications, the technical capability, maintenance, operational costs and failure rates have reached levels deemed unacceptable by the Department of Defense. The inability of these radars to keep pace with current and emerging test customer requirements have resulted in increased flight safety risk and reduced customer satisfaction. The ranges that will have their radars replaced are the White Sands Test Center, N.M.; Yuma Test Center, Ariz.; Aberdeen Test Center, Md.; and Redstone Test Center, Ala.
The team has been awarded a contract to develop and deploy modernized range instrumentation radars, replacing the fleet of radar systems currently operating at U.S. Army test ranges. The Range Radar Replacement Program (RRRP) has a total potential value of $385 million over ten years if all options are exercised. The initial award, worth $29 million, provides funding for the engineering, manufacturing and development phase of the program and initial production and integration of the new radar systems at many different test ranges.
The General Dynamics RRRP solution leverages the XSTAR family of instrumentation radars developed by STAR Dynamics.
XSTAR radars are self-contained, TENA-compliant, diverse-waveform, multi-object tracking systems that produce time-space-position information. The system architecture includes a phased-array, digital-beamforming, processor, a multi-object tracker and control, data-acquisition, recording an processing subsystems. The XSTAR family of radars has three models, the M220, M235 and M250, with each one serving a different purpose.
