Netherlands Orders 51 Mobile Drone-Detection Radars for Ukraine

The Ministry of Defense of the Netherlands has ordered 51 mobile radars for Ukraine to detect drones.

This is stated in the official press release.

The contract was signed today at Robin Radar Systems in The Hague.

The radars ordered are capable of detecting small drones and distinguishing them, for example, from birds, and doing so even at high speeds.

What’s unique about radars is that they do their job when deployed on mobile platforms. Because the detection system is mobile, it is harder for an adversary to find the radar and therefore harder to destroy.

This makes it possible to continuously detect enemy drones and then take measures to disable them.

Later this year, the Ministry of Defense of the Netherlands will transfer these systems to Ukraine’s needs and hand them over gradually.

The authorities have bought radars from Robin Radar before, but the previous ones were static and are now placed in different locations.

Feedback from users included a request to make it possible to place them on mobile platforms. Further development of the radar system provided this new functionality.

Robin Radar manufactures a variety of radars for detecting small targets, including drones. The main ones presented on the official website are Max, IRIS, and ELIRA:

All of them provide a 360° azimuthal view and update information at a frequency of about one second, but only Max and IRIS work in 3D mode. In other words, in addition to the plane position, it also shows the height of the object.

There is also a project to integrate IRIS from Robin Radar with the Vision Flex CUAS optical autonomous surveillance system by OpenWorks Engineering, which increases the efficiency of target detection and recognition.