History
ATM (Academia Tehnică Militară „Ferdinand I”, the Military Technical Academy) in Bucharest was founded in 1949 with a Signals Faculty of three departments, the electronics department also covering radar [1]. The radar speciality moved between faculties and departments until 2001, when a single electronics speciality, military electronic equipment and systems (ESEM), was adopted; in 2004 the academy was reorganised into two faculties, one of them for military electronic and information systems (SEIM), whose communications and military electronic systems department (CSEM) became a Department in 2011 [1]. The academy received the honorary name „Ferdinand I” in 2018 [1].
Radar research
In 1970–1989 its researchers designed installations protecting radar stations against asynchronous active and noise jamming, the IPIBAR, IPIBAR M and IPIBAR M1…M4 for radio rangefinders and the IPIBAR R for radio altimeters, and the digital moving-target selection installations INSTM 12, INSTM 14, INSTM 18 and INSTM START [1]. They were made at IEI in series of hundreds and thousands of units, many of them exported [1]; IEI also made the academy’s AFILL intermediate-frequency amplifier [2].
A radio-electronic warfare research laboratory worked at the academy in 1985–1990 and became the Centre for Combat Equipment Studies and Experiments (CSETL, K-10) in 1990, active until 1996 [1]. It designed and had approved the GRIFON and SAIRL radar and laser warning stations, the SARA radar warning station and the TRASEDA automation set, and made radar-absorbent materials, circularly polarised antennas for 2–4, 4–8, 8–12 and 12–18 GHz, very wideband antennas (2–18 GHz) and an anechoic chamber for microwave measurements at 2–18 GHz [1]. From 1990 competitively funded projects covered microwave components for radar, such as dielectric resonator filters, and theoretical studies on recognising aircraft by their radar signatures and on radar image reconstruction [1]. International projects included ground-penetrating radar antennas for landmine detection, coordinated by TU Delft, and the ECONET 2007 programme with INP Grenoble and the University of Montenegro [1]. The department’s work won two gold medals in Brussels in 1997, a gold and a silver medal in Brussels in 1999, a gold medal in Iași in 1994 and two gold medals in Iași in 1996 [1].