page_title: SCR-584 radar
section_title: Operational use
hierarchical_section_title: SCR-584 radar / Operational use
caption_attribution_description: Operators console for an SCR-584 radar unit. This picture is from an Army Air Force manual titles "Radar Storm Detection".
context_page_description: The SCR-584 was an automatic-tracking microwave radar developed by the MIT Radiation Laboratory during World War II. It was one of the most advanced ground-based radars of its era, and became one of the primary gun laying radars used worldwide well into the 1950s. A trailer-mounted mobile version was the SCR-784.
  In 1937, America's first fire-control radar, the SCR-268 radar, had proven to be insufficiently accurate due in part to its long wavelength. In 1940, Vannevar Bush, heading the National Defense Research Committee, established the "Microwave Committee" and the "Fire Control" division to develop a more advanced radar anti-aircraft system in time to assist the British air-defense effort. In September of that year, a British delegation, the Tizard Mission, revealed to US and Canadian researchers that they had developed a magnetron oscillator operating at the top end of the UHF band, allowing greatly increased accuracy. Bush organized the Radiation Laboratory at the MIT to develop applications using it. This included a new short-range air-defense radar.
context_section_description: Although the first operational unit was delivered in May 1943, various bureaucratic problems led to it being delayed in being delivered to the front-line troops. The SCR-584 was first used in combat at Anzio in February 1944, where it played a key role in breaking up the Luftwaffe's concentrated air attacks on the confined beachhead. The SCR-584 was no stranger to the front, where it followed the troops, being used to direct aircraft, locate enemy vehicles (one radar is said to have picked up German vehicles at a distance of 26 kilometers), and track the trajectories of artillery shells, both to adjust the ballistic tables for the 90 millimeter guns, and to pinpoint the location of German batteries for counter-battery fire. After D-Day, the SCR-584 was used in the rapidly shifting very front lines to guide planes to their targets with increased accuracy.  For example, the Control Net Systems Group of the 508th Sq of the 404th Fighter Bomber Group, 9th Air Force ran the SCR-584.  From 14 Jul 1944 until 27 Oct 1944 they were attached to Sec 1 Co A, 555th Sig Aircraft Warning Battalion and served in fluid, forward positions.
  The SCR-584 was so successful that it was adapted for use by the United States Navy. CXBL, a prototype of the navy version, was mounted on the carrier USS Lexington in March 1943, while the production version, the SM, built by General Electric, was operational on the carriers USS Bunker Hill and USS Enterprise by October 1943. A lighter version of the system was also developed, the SCR-784. The only real difference was that the new design weighed 12,000 lb, whereas the original was 20,000.
  Davenport waterproofed a number of the radar sets so that they could be carried aboard the Allied armada launching the Normandy landings on D-Day.
  Automatic gunlaying (using, among others, the SCR-584 radar) and the proximity fuze played an important part in Operation Diver, (the British operation to counter the V1 flying bombs). Both of these had been requested by AA Command and arrived in numbers, starting in June 1944, just as the guns reached their free-firing positions on the south eastern coast of England. Seventeen per cent of all flying bombs entering the coastal 'gun belt' were destroyed by guns in the first week on the coast.  This rose to 60 per cent by 23 August and 74 per cent in the last week of the month, when on one extraordinary day 82 per cent were shot down.  The rate increased from one V-1 for every 2,500 shells fired to one for every hundred.
  After the war, the radar was adapted for use in the AN/MPQ-12, and AN/MPM-38 systems, a US Army field artillery missile system (MGM-5 Corporal). A modified version was also used to control and beacon-track (using an onboard transponder) the CORONA spy satellite.
  In 1953, the SCR-584-Mod II was used for tracking the Redstone (rocket), its range extended to 740 km by the use of an onboard transceiver.
  Despite using vacuum tubes and being powered by an analog computer, some specimens of the SCR-584 are still operational today. In 1995 the first Doppler On Wheels (DOW) radar adapted the MP-61 pedestal from an SCR-584 for use in a mobile weather radar.  Using this pedestal, the DOWs created the first maps of tornado winds, discovered hurricane boundary layer rolls, and pioneered many other observational studies.  The pedestal housed first a 6' then an 8' antenna.  Later the original motors were replaced with more powerful brushless versions for faster scanning in high winds.  Three DOWs are now operated as National Science Foundation facilities by the Center for Severe Weather Research.  One is found at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, where the 584 pedestal is the platform for the new Shared Mobile Atmospheric Research & Teaching Radar, or SMART-R.
caption: Operators console for the SCR-584.
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