MUTR

MUTR is a mobile tracking radar built by Weibel Scientific, the Danish Doppler-radar specialist based in Allerød. Introduced around 2020, it sits at the counter-UAS end of a product line that also includes range-safety and ballistic-tracking radars used on weapons-test ranges. The system is designed to detect small aerial targets — commercial quadcopters, fixed-wing drones, loitering munitions — and feed their tracks to effectors such as guns, jammers, or short-range missile launchers, filling a role that short-range air-defence units have struggled to adapt to since cheap unmanned systems became a battlefield fixture.

The radar operates in the Ku-band and uses continuous-wave Doppler processing, the technique Weibel has built its business on. CW Doppler is unusual in a tracking radar — most military systems in this role are pulse-Doppler — and it carries a specific advantage: low-radar-cross-section targets moving at slow radial velocities, which are precisely the signatures small drones present, are difficult for pulse systems to separate from clutter but remain legible in a Doppler frequency return. The antenna and processing hardware are packaged for vehicle mounting, and the system outputs a real-time track stream over standard interfaces for slew-to-cue handoff. Weibel describes it as a tactical tracker rather than a search sensor; a wider-area surveillance radar typically does the initial detection, and the MUTR then holds a tight track long enough for an engagement.

Public operator information is thin. The Mu-series has been promoted at defence exhibitions across Europe and the Middle East, and Weibel has long-standing relationships with NATO ministries of defence as well as with weapons-test ranges in the United States and the United Kingdom, where its older tracking radars have been fixtures for decades. Specific MUTR contracts have not been publicly announced in the detail that would allow a deployment count, and the system has no reported combat use.

Where it fits is the gap between short-range air defence and point-defence against drones: a mobile cueing radar a battery can push forward, specialised in the target class that broader SHORAD radars often miss. It competes most directly with Ku-band counter-UAS radars from Leonardo DRS (the former RADA line), IAI’s ELTA Systems, and Hensoldt, each of which has taken a different technical route to the same problem — a market that has grown steadily since the drone war in Ukraine turned low-cost aerial threats into a daily tactical reality for European armies watching from across the border.