Transcript of essential parts of:

T.R.E (TRE) Bruneval Report No. 6/R/25

FINAL TECHNICAL REPORT ON THE GERMAN RDF EQUIPMENT

CAPTURED AT BRUNEVAL ON 28^TH FEBRUARY 1942

This report passes a wide range of astonishing information. Which, however, in some details, is not entirely correct. Owing to the lack of intelligence information. Which sometimes was gathered from interrogated prisoners-of-war. These men (or was it only the captured Würzburg operator?), must have passed on apparently false or at least distorted information.

This famous raid had been initiated by R.V. Jones, who wanted to know the state of the art of German Radar techniques.

Hans Jucker from Switzerland, sent me recently some additional information on this subject:

The T.R.E. final report 6/R/25 on the German Wurzburg radar equipment captured at Bruneval, that you recently installed on your webpage is one of the more remarkable technical paper of the WWII epoch !

The report was heavily recognized by the British as well as the American radar designers and it was referenced later after the war in many radar books. The report brings to light some very interesting points as for instance that the Germans were using matched filter approximation for the design of the Wurzburg radar receiver. This is of especial interest when it is noted that this equipment was designed before WWII.

The matched filter, usually found in the IF stage of a radar receiver, has a frequency response function that maximizes the output signal-to-noise ratio, which means maximizing detection. It was first described in an American classified 1943 WWII report, but wasn't widely known until reprinted in the Proceedings of the IEEE in 1963. Fortunately, the matched filter confirmed the practice of the early radar engineers who made the receiver bandwidth equal to the reciprocal of the radar pulse width.

An other interesting point is the high pulse repetition frequency of the Wurzburg radar, it made a visibility factor less than 1 possible. The theoretical background of the visibility factor that allows in certain cases to detect signals below the noise level, was first described in the famous MIT Radiation Laboratory volume THRESHOLD SIGNALS edited by Lawson and Uhlenbeck after WWII.