The Bystra Redeployable Radar is designed for detecting and localizing air targets at short ranges and for supporting air-defense units that cover tactical battle groups against attacks from the air. BYSTRA is a multifunction and multi-mission radar with versatile capabilities and various applications, including detection and tracking of typical air threats as combat aircrafts and helicopters (also when hovering), as well as missiles, UAVs and mortar shells. The Bystra is a short range radar that is a derivative of the Soła system. Soła radars have been operated by the Polish military for some time now. Bystra System, however, utilizes the AESA array technology, contrary to its predecessor. The main task that Bystra has is to support SHORAD and VSHORAD air defence elements. The radar may thus act as a fire control asset for the Poprad system and, at least to some extent, support the operations of the Narew solution.
The radar can operate in several modes matched to the predefined combat missions. In each mode, an omnidirectional search is performed by rotating the antenna and by scanning space using software formed antenna beams. This enables the effective use of the radar resources and allows for adjusting search patterns to characteristics of a deployment site and to the accomplished function (detection/tracking) or the combat mission. In the design of the BYSTRA Redeployable Radar, several new technologies are applied to obtain required performance in terms of ranges of targets detection and tracking the targets of different classes, jamming and clutter suppression, high measurement accuracy of targets’ coordinates of the, increased resolution and enhanced reliability. The radar is operated in the C-band and has an instrumental range of 80 kilometers. It covers elevation up to the angle of 70 degrees and refreshes the image every 2 seconds.
These technologies include: an active electronically steered antenna with software controlled beams, liquid cooled solid-state T/R modules, digital beam-forming, digital synthesis, coding and matched filtering of signals, robust coordinates estimation of with the use of the algorithm that limits the influence of multipath propagation, tracking subsystem using the multi-hypothesis algorithm, subsystem for detecting hovering helicopters. Basic components of the radar, its deployment subsystem, wire and radio communication subsystem, navigation subsystem (GPS and inertial), power generator, two operator’s posts (one of them portable) and auxilliary components (cooling subsystem, meteo station etc.) are installed on the armored Å»UBR/P vehicle. A radar decoy with an own power generator is located on the trailer.
