WASHINGTON – Shipboard radar experts at Raytheon Technologies Corp. will continue supporting an expensive surface-search radar system for large U.S. Navy warships until a suitable replacement comes online, under terms of a $9.7 million order announced Friday.
Officials of the Naval Sea Systems Command in Washington are asking the Raytheon Intelligence & Space segment in Tewksbury, Mass., for engineering design and component replacement parts to support the Dual Band Radar (DBR) systems.
The Navy's DBR combines the benefits of S-band and X-band radar capabilities for a range of environments, while its open architecture software design enables automatic operation with minimal human intervention.
The S-band VSR radar arrays, built by Lockheed Martin, are integrated with Raytheon's SPY-3 X-band Multi-Function Radar to form the advanced DBR, which was tested in 2009 at the Navy's Engineering Test Center at Wallops Island, Va.
Initial installations of the DBR were aboard the Navy's Zumwalt-class land-attack destroyer and Ford-class aircraft carriers. By 2016 the DBR was discontinued after being installed only on the aircraft Carrier USS Gerald R. Ford because the DBR was considered too expensive and perhaps too much radar than the carrier needed.
By 2016 Navy officials decided to replace the DBR aboard aircraft carriers and other large surface warships with the more-economical Raytheon Enterprise Air Surveillance Radar (EASR).
EASR will be installed on the aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy -- the second ship of the Ford class -- to replace the discontinued DBR. The America- class amphibious assault USS Bougainville (LHA 8), under construction in Pascagoula, Miss., is expected to be the first ship that will take EASR to sea.
In the meantime, however, Navy officials still must maintain the few DBR systems that are operational, hence this order to Raytheon for replacement parts and engineering services.
On this order Raytheon will do the work in Andover, Marlborough, and Tewksbury, Mass.p; and in Portsmouth, R.I., and should be finished by November 2022. For more information contact Raytheon Intelligence & Space online at www.rtx.com, or Naval Sea Systems Command at www.navsea.navy.mil.
