The Defence Acquisition Council (DAC) of the ministry of defence has cleared the acquisition of 30 weapon locating radars – Swati – from Bharat Electronics Ltd (BEL) at a total cost of Rs 1,605 crores ($256 million).
Till the Kargil War India did not have any Gun Locating Radar. It only had the British Cymbline Mortar locating Radar. A few pieces of the American ANTPQ 36, gun locating radars were bought off the shelf to meet the immediate requirements during the Kargil War. The purpose of such radars is to find the position (location) from which the hostile flat trajectory, high angle trajectory guns & mortars and rockets are being fired on own troops. This facilitates the direction of the fire of own artillery guns & rockets to silence and destroy such enemy guns and rockets
A scale model of the WLR. The array is at its maximum slew setting of 125°.
The DRDO and Bharat Electronics now has developed an indigenous radar for the purpose. Their first version was called Rajendra. Swati Radar is their latest improved version. It is believed that the DRDO scientists while testing the trajectory of the missiles at Chandipur observed that their tracking radars could pick up artillery guns booming at a nearby army firing range. This led to the development of Rajendra model & its improved version Swati.
The range for the Swati radar while tracking gun shells is more than 20 kms and for rockets, about 30 kms.
These radars will be used by the Surveillance and Target Acquisition Branch of Indian Artillery. Swati, the radar has been developed as a coherent, electronically scanned C-Band pulse doppler radar.
The radar will automatically locates hostile artillery, mortars and rocket launchers and direct friendly fire to locate the impact point of friendly artillery fire to issue necessary corrections.
