Radar Division

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(NB This text is an extract from the late Harry Cole's unpublished work "The History of the Marconi Radar Company" 1997.)

Reorganisation and Expansion

The combination of new technology, widening markets and our success in reaching them looked, to Corporate Management, as though it could lead to severe overload if left to continue. It was decided to seek a better overall structure which would meet the changing business and technical world better. The business consultants, McKinsey's were engaged to do this in 1964, and their recommendations were acted upon. This led to the creation of three new groupings of the Marconi Company's Product Divisions. They were Telecommunications, Electronics, and Components Groups. Radar Division found itself in the Electronics group alongside two new related partners — Automation Division and Computer Division. The Telecomms Group contained a new Division — Space Com­munications, which was to take over work previously done by Radar Division.

In 1965, Dr. B. J. O'Kane, the Electronics Group Manager, appointed Mr. John Sutherland as Radar Division's Manager, who later became the Radar Company's Managing Director; posts he held with great success and distinction, until 1982. He thus became the longest serving CEO in Marconi Radar's history.

The reorganization into three Groups was largely motivated by market judgements which foresaw:

a) a slowing down of Radar Air Defence business;
b) a fast burgeoning of Space Communications business; and
c) a growing market for Automation using microelectronics.

Whilst proponents and antagonists for this forecast remain alive, there will always be argument on the matter; suffice to say that all these judgements were completely misguided as far as Radar Division's fortunes were concerned. History has shown that the Division stood on the threshold of its biggest growth and that the successes of the SCAT and Apollo Space Communications projects would not lead to a sustainable future in the business.

Similarly with microelectronics. Despite much effort and investment in plant and staff, the Company could not meet the competition of the day. The only real success in that realm was the emergence of the 'Myriad' computer, the fastest real-time machine on the market in those days.

The re-organization had created new Divisions which took valuable skilled staff from Radar Division and exacerbated delays on several significant MoD contracts. Notable among these were the massive 'Linesman' and 'Green Ginger' projects. Both of these were regarded as vital to the defence of the realm. Linesman was the military part of a combined civil/ military project, the civil part being named 'Mediator'. They were aimed at getting comprehensive defence and air traffic control requirements satisfied in a harmonious manner. These projects included not only a large number of gigantic modern radars, but all the necessary control centres and communications infrastructure. For instance, Linesman involved three Type 85 and four Type 84 radars plus a Passive Detection system developed jointly with RAE. Green Ginger consisted of a mobile surveillance radar and height finder.

The next explosion of radar business came from the NATO plan to establish the new NATO Air Defense Ground Environment (NADGE). In 1965 it was NATO practice to award contracts to consortia of companies from several different NATO member nations on the basis of the countries' contributions to NATO funds. Marconi joined a consortium led by Hughes Aircraft Corporation together with four other European companies. After much negotiation and a second round of bidding, the Hughes bid won the contract which was let in 1966. The main content for Marconi was the supply of an updated version of the nodding height-finder, which now became the Type S269. In the first round of bidding for this business, Marconi included the Passive Detection system referred to above. This was unique to the Marconi Company and thus, could not be bid by any other competitor. This went against the NATO bidding rules and so had to be deleted from the second round bid. Marconi supplied updated versions of the S247 and fourteen S269s.

The new corporate structure of the three groups included the establishment of a formal Product Planning Department in 1966, with a group of senior staff researching future ATC requirements and a small group of three senior managers deliberating on the next generation of military radars.

For the latter, operational requirements were discussed and agreed: these were seen to be rooted in three main principles:

a) It must be a mobile system, capable of rapid deployment.
b) It must be very robust in the face of different types of 'jamming'.
c) It must be modular, capable of meeting a wide variety of threats over a pan-climatic range.

The core of the S600 series (as it became) consisted of con­tainerised radar sensors, one working at S-band and another at L-band complete with their signal processing equipment. To these was added a C-band nodding height-finder. The containers were all helicopter C 130 transportable and ground mobile. The designs were made with cost-effec­tiveness and value-for-money as keynotes.

Progress was swift and the system was able to be publicly announced at the Company's Agents con­ference in May 1967 and the Press invited the next day to demonstrations at the Bushy test site. A fully operational system was exhibited at the Farnborough Air Show in 1968 and soon after, the first sales were made.

1967 saw some other notable events; the 'Myriad' computer had been developed from its prototype, 'Imp' and became the heart of the design for the big Flight Plan Processing system (FPPS) to be supplied to the Ministry of Aviation. The FPPS contract was signed in that year and the specification had extremely onerous requirements; for instance, the system called for very high levels of reliability which would give a probability of not more than one system failure in 50 years. It is a tribute to the designers that in its 17 years of 24-hour service, it never did have a system failure. Three Myriad computers were operated in parallel, each fed with the same inputs; their outputs were continuously compared and a 'majority voting' system was used in the event of malfunction of one of the three. The system handled all the flight planning for the whole of the very busy Southern half of the UK's controlled airspace.

Also in that year, a Research study for the Royal Navy was well advanced and began to put work into Radar Division's Development labs. This was the precursor of what was to become GWS25 — later 'Sea Wolf', the highly-successful Naval defence weapons system.

More ground radar business came from South Africa, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia.

Radar Division

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