Originally Posted by
vintage ATCO
There was, god bless its valves. I held the first UK validation on an AR15 in 1974. The antenna was on a small tower but we were already over 500ft up so the antenna was angled half a degree down. Fantastic low level coverage. Great radar. We were the second airfield in the country, after Heathrow, to get SSR.
Plessey installed an 'AR1b' head on Farnborough's tall concrete radar tower after the '74 airshow. This which I believe was the prototype AR15 was no good as it was too high agl and ground reflections tended to bounce up and cancel out high cover above 20,000ft; as we did area radar at the time (including autonomous airway crossings), good high cover was essential and the Marconi S232 wasn't approved for area radar use so we got our AR1 back and were never included in the AR15 replacement programme.
The AR1 soldiered on until it was replaced by a Watchman in 1991 (when they had adjusted the tilt of the aerial sufficiently) on the same tower, but when TAG took over the airfield, this radar tower was on Qinetiq property so the radar was replaced by a (in my opinion) somewhat inferior Raytheon ASR10 wef 23 Nov 2002 when we made the move to the new control tower.
The RAF recovered their Watchman for use as a spare but all the radar consoles were left in situ in the old control tower (the RAF having switched to raster scan consoles and thus having no use for them) and they were demolished with the old control tower in early 2003; what a waste; surely they could have been sold elsewhere even if only for spare parts use.