SAFRAN: a digital beamforming radar for battlefield applications

The air defence systems of the first decade of the twenty-first century will need to use new detection and target recognition techniques to respond to the changing threat environment, and particularly, to offer better resistance to countermeasures, and faster reaction time. The SAFRAN demonstrator is an exploratory development for the French Defence Ministry aimed at validating new radar techniques for future battlefield surveillance systems. The initial purpose of the demonstrator is to test and validate this new technique called digital beamforming (DBF) which overcomes the threat of multiple jammers and improve the radar performance. SAFRAN is the French acronym for air and ground surveillance using digital beamforming radar.