Type 704 Chinese Counter-Battery Radar System

The Type 704 is a counter-battery radar designed to accurately locate the hostile artillery, rocket and ground-to-ground missile launcher immediately after the firing of enemy, and support friendly artillery by providing guidance of counter fire. Built by NORINCO, it was first displayed publicly in 1988's ASIADEX defence show. Type 704 radar shares the same root as its larger cousin, the SLC-2 Radar: four AN/TPQ-37 Firefinder radar have been sold to China and this had become the foundation of SLC-2 radar development. Aside from political reasons, the US$10 million plus unit price tag of TPQ-37 (including after sale logistic support) was simply too costly for Chinese. Decision was made to develop a domestic equivalent after mastering the technologies of TPQ-37. After the initial test of TPQ-37 in Tangshan (汤山) Range near Nanjing in 1988, and in Xuanhua District in October of the same year, several shortcomings of TPQ-37 were discovered and further intensive tests were conducted and completed in 1994. The requirement of the Chinese domestic equivalent was subsequently modified to address these issues revealed in trials. Due to the limitation of the Chinese industrial capability at the time, decision was made to develop the Chinese domestic equivalent in several steps. The first step was to develop a smaller one, which would result in the Chinese equivalent of AN/TPQ-36 Firefinder radar, Type 704 series radar, and based on the experience gained from this program, a more capable larger version in the same class of AN/TPQ-37 Firefinder radar would be developed, which eventually resulted in SLC-2 series. Type 704 is the first of the Type 704 series of counter-battery radars. Developmental work of Type 704 begun in parallel with the introduction of AN/TPQ-37 radar into Chinese service, and the reported experience gained on the Chinese reverse engineering of TPQ-37 has influenced Type 704 radar. One problem revealed in the tests was that the reliability of TPQ-37 is much lower than what was claimed. The reason was that when TPQ-37 was deployed in environments with high humidity and high level of rainfall (southern China), high salinity (coastal regions), high altitude (southwestern China), and subjected to daily high temperature differences (northwestern China), malfunctions occurs more frequently. Type 704 radar was designed specifically to improve the reliability against these harsh environmental factors.