START-1M

The START-1M is a modernised S-band radar station for detecting and tracking low-flying aircraft, with a double-curvature antenna with a cosec² pattern [1]. IEI, by then SC ELPROF SA, won the defence ministry’s tender for it and began the antenna, the first double-curvature radar antenna in Romania; in August 1995 the ministry transferred the project to the army research institute ICSITA (then ICDA), and ELPROF’s radar work ended [1]. The prototype, built in cooperation between Marconi Radar Projects of the United Kingdom and IEI and then taken over by the institute, dates from 2000 and was approved in 2001; it then worked for nine years at Baia Dobrogei, Tulcea [1]. AEROSTAR made flexible waveguides for it in aviation technology at the end of the 1990s [1]. It was the modernised successor of the START-1 [1].