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ChezDaJez -> RE: Japanese Air to Air Combat Dropoff (9/17/2006 2:24:30 AM)
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As Iron Duke noted, only six sets were built.
quote:
Kammer was assigned to the project to develop a "microwave early warning (MEW)" radar in June 1942, and the first operational MEW or "AN/CPS-1" was in operation in Britain by January 1944. Six preproduction MEWs were put together by hand at the Rad Lab to get the device out in the field.
Although Eagle and MEW were derived from similar concepts, they had little resemblance. A complete MEW system weighed about 60 tonnes (66 tonnes), required eight trucks for transport, and drew 23 kilowatts of power from a portable generator. It took 150 troops three days to pick up and move a MEW.
The MEW control electronics included five 30 centimeter (1 foot) scope displays, allowing operators to track large numbers of targets. While Eagle used electronic steering, MEW required 360-degree coverage, and so it used a rotating antenna. The MEW antenna was actually two antennas joined back-to-back, with one antenna covering low altitudes and the other covering high. Each of the two antenna consisted of a linear array with 106 dipoles in front of a solid reflector, in the form of a section of cylinder with parabolic curvature laid horizontally.
Each reflector was 7.6 meters (25 feet) wide. The low-coverage reflector was 2.4 meters (7 feet 10 inches) tall, while the high-coverage reflector was 1.5 meters (4 feet 11 inches) tall. They could form a beam only 0.8 degrees wide that could provide extremely precise location of intruders, at least in the horizontal plane. The beam was very tall and so MEW did not do well at height-finding.
A second MEW was was operational in Britain by the summer of 1944. The two radars were very useful in helping to deal with the V-1 Blitz, as MEW's longer range gave greater advance warning of flying bombs, allowing more effective fighter interceptions. Since the V-1s flew at preset low altitudes, MEW's inability to compute heights was not a problem.
The Rad Lab's office at the TRE modified a MEW system to be transportable during April 1944, and this MEW was set up on the Normandy beachhead, arriving in pieces on 12 June 1944. It included a complete fighter-control center, organized around a vertical transparent plotting panel on which plotters marked positions and wrote notes in mirror writing. The MEW helped Allied fighters protect the invasion forces from German intruders, and in particular keep track of the massive flow of air traffic over the area.
The height-finding problems was addressed by adding a British AMES Type 13 CMH radar. The same idea was used with some other MEW installations with the US counterpart to the AMES Type 13 CMH, the AN/APS-10 Little Abner.
Another MEW arrived in France in late summer, but the MEW systems were large and complicated and so were of limited use during the rapid Allied advance west. SCR-584s were more portable and accompanied the armies as they advanced.
A MEW was sent to Saipan, where the USAAF was ramping up Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber raids against Japan. The system arrived on 21 September 1944, and was not greeted with much enthusiasm. It was big, it was clumsy, and since air traffic in the Pacific was much less dense than in Europe, longwave radars like the SCR-270s seemed able to do the job just fine. Destructive Japanese low-level intruder air raids on Saipan suggested that the longwave radars didn't do the job as well as might be desired, and the MEW was operating on top of Mount Tapochau on Saipan by New Year's Eve. Japanese raiders suddenly lost the element of surprise, and the MEW also served well to locate downed aircraft in the sea around the island.
The above is from the Website "The Wizard War: WWII and the Origins of Radar. It contais very good information on the design, development and performance of most radars used by combatant countries in WWII. The link can be found: The Wizard War
Chez
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