page_title: RAF Fylingdales
section_title: Cold War
hierarchical_section_title: RAF Fylingdales / History / Cold War
caption_attribution_description: English: BMEWS solid-state phased-array radar at RAF Fylingdales. Photo by User:spliced
context_page_description: Royal Air Force Fylingdales or more simply RAF Fylingdales is a Royal Air Force station on Snod Hill in the North York Moors, England. Its motto is "Vigilamus". It is a radar base and is also part of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System. As part of intelligence-sharing arrangements between the United States and United Kingdom, data collected at RAF Fylingdales are shared between the two countries. Its primary purpose is to give the British and US governments warning of an impending ballistic missile attack. A secondary role is the detection and tracking of orbiting objects; Fylingdales is part of the United States Space Surveillance Network. As well as its early-warning and space-tracking roles, Fylingdales has a third function - the Satellite Warning Service for the UK. It keeps track of spy satellites used by other countries, so that secret activities in the UK can be carried out when they are not overhead. The armed services, defence manufacturers and research organisations, including universities, take advantage of this facility.
context_section_description: The station was sited on a former wartime mortar range on Snod Hill, which had to be comprehensively cleared by RAF Bomb Disposal before building could begin. The station was built by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in 1962, and was maintained by RCA (Great Britain), now Serco Group plc. RAF Fylingdales consisted of three 130-foot (40 m) diameter 'golfballs' or geodesic domes (radomes) containing mechanically steered radar. Operation of the Fylingdales Site transferred to RAF Fighter Command on 15 January 1964 although the site became operational on 17 September 1963. It became a local tourist attraction as a result.  Coach tours to the nearby coastal town of Whitby drove past the site, at which point drivers would typically switch the radio on and allow passengers to listen to the interference caused by the radars.
  Between 1989 and 1992, Raytheon, the US defence contractor, completed a contract that saw the domes replaced by the current tetrahedron ('pyramid') structure, housing the AESA phased array radar. The site is 820 feet (250 m) above sea level and the structure is nine floors high rising from its ground level to 120 feet (37 m) high.
caption: The Solid State Phased Array Radar (SSPAR)
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