Würzburg radar
Würzburg-Riese at Gatow.
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| Country of origin | Germany |
|---|---|
| Introduced | 1940 |
| No. built | c. 4,000 |
| Type | Gun laying radar |
| Frequency | 560 MHz |
| PRF | 1875 per second |
| Pulsewidth | 2 μs |
| Range | up to 70 km (43 mi) |
| Diameter | 7.5 metres (25 ft) |
| Azimuth | 0–360° |
| Elevation | 0–90° |
| Precision | ±15 metres (49 ft) |
| Power | 8 kW |
The low-UHF band Würzburg radar was the primary ground-based gun laying radar for the Luftwaffe and the Wehrmacht Heer (German Army) 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 as most German military electronic systems had European place names used for them, not necessarily all-German ones.
In January 1934, Telefunken met with German radar researchers, notably Dr. Rudolf Kühnhold of the Communications Research Institute of the Kriegsmarine and Dr. Hans Hollmann, an expert in microwaves, who informed them of their work on an early warning radar. Telefunken's director of research, Dr. Wilhelm Runge, was unimpressed and dismissed the idea as science fiction. The developers then went their own way and formed GEMA (Gesellschaft für Elektroakustische und Mechanische Apparate) eventually collaborating with Lorenz on the development of 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 they had built a working experimental unit in the 50 cm band that was able to generate strong returns off a target Junkers Ju 52. By the next summer, the experimental set-up had been developed into a prototype known as the Darmstadt, which offered a range accuracy of 50 metres (55 yd) at 5 kilometres (3.1 mi), not nearly enough for gun laying. Attitudes changed in late 1938, when a full development contract was received from the Luftwaffe.
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