U-boat radar | Forums

[blastomatic1759]

yeah but you gotta love the radar in the fog. one good thing about the fog , the planes cant find you in it ,although the destroyers are pretty good at showing up all of the sudden , and making me soil myself.

[mbabbs]

You should use the radar with extreme caution.

An active radar pinpoints your position exactly, even in fog so expect attacks if you use it continuously. If you do use it, and personally I see no need to, then use the single sweep. It does tend to switch itself off in rough weather while sweeping.

The Metox is a passive radar and is great for detecting active radar

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, but the allies were able to detect even the Metox later in the war and used it to track subs. I am not sure if this is modelled in the game though.

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[W.Irving]

How could they detect a passive radar detector?
It's just a radio receiver.

[mbabbs]

From uboat.net

My mistake - although the Metox did emit a weak signal its real weakness was that it didn't detect the ASV radar. So in theory using the Metox won't give your position away, but you won't detect anything that is using an ASV radar.

"Metox also emitted a weak signal, a property common to many radio receivers, especially superheterodyne receivers. In an indirect way, this had serious consequences. In the spring of 1943, the U-boats suffered badly because of the introduction by the British of a 10cm ASV radar. But a captured British officer told the Germans that their misfortunes were caused by the transmission of Metox, which were detected by Coastal Command aircraft. After verifying that this was technically possible, the Germans believed the story. This delayed the introduction of Naxos by some months, during which the U-boats suffered heavy losses."

Also

"Centimetric ASV radar was first used (in an experimental installation) against submarines on 17 March 1943. Metox did not detect these wavelengths, so that surprise attacks on U-boats were once again possible."

[Dominicrigg]

For a time Metox offered Uboats some insurance against surface attack from the air. All the more remarkable, then, that a year later Donitz abandoned it. This decision was taken on the basis of a story told by a captured British pilot to his German interrogators. Allied planes hardly ever used radar, he said, for they were able to home in on the radiation emmitted by the Uboats Metox reciever, which could be detected from up to 90 miles away.

It was a clever deception, and for a time it left uboats vulnerable once again to suprise attack. For Donitz Metox radiations appeared to offer an explanation for all 'the hitherto mysterious and inexplicable phenomena' that seemed to have beset the uboat arm, 'such as the enemy's circumvention of the uboat dispositions and our losses in the open sea.'

This episode demonstrates how little the 'Berlin experts' knew of Allied radar advances. Scientific and technical development in the Riech suffered from the rough philistinism of the Nazis: even those with brains had to do their bit at the front for the fatherland, despite the fact that their talents could have been best used elsewhere.

Quote from "The Battle of the Atlantic".

What a hero that pilot was, im suprised that he could keep a straight face while he span that yarn even more suprised if he managed it under toture!

[W.Irving]

The Brits were always excellent at deception.
Tanks, rubber armies, rubber merchants, radar, aluminium radar decoys, bouncing bombs, op Fortitude... Six years of hell - we owe them a LOT!

[WilhelmSchulz.-]

I forgot about this.
http://uboat.net/technical/radar.html
And
http://uboat.net/technical/detectors.html