How do the radar and sonar upgrades work?

[mookiemookie]

If this has been asked before, forgive me. I did a search and didn't find anything on it.

It's April of '42 and I'm headed out back to the coast of New York for a bit of hunting. Before I left, I did my "Wheel of Fortune-esque prize showcase spending spree" (I had a crapload of renown...sank a Bogue class carrier out of a convoy, a ton of miscellaneous cargo ships as well as the passenger liner in NY harbor on my last patrol! ) I bought the FuMO29GEMA Radar upgrade, as well as the S-Gerät sonar. My question is....how the heck do they work??

I've played around a bit with the radar, and the sweep options. It seems pretty much worthless. Single sweep is one sweep and then turns itself off, obviously, but the continuous sweep option turns itself off after a bit as well. I didn't dive, or change course or anything. It just pops itself off. My question is what good does it do? Is it used more in situations where there's poor visibility? Does it attract destroyers? Meaning can they pick up on your radar signal and home in on you?

As far as the sonar goes, I can't figure out how to set a "target" for it. My hydrophone station has the "approximate distance to target" and "exact distance to target" buttons, but if I click them, it says that there's no target selected. How do I select a target?

Thanks in advance for any help you guys can offer.

EDIT: Not sure if it makes a difference but I'm running the GW mod

[fredbass]

Well I really haven't seen much benefit from either myself. The radar should stay on as long as your surfaced and not in rough weather. In rough weather, as the boat bobs up and down, it can kick off as your boat partially submerges for a bit. I've been told the radar does help. I think you can't have your time compression set too high or it definitely won't help much, especially for aircraft. Sometimes I just think it brings the enemy to you rather than you finding them, but that's just my opinion. I tend to only use it at night or stormy / cloudy weather since there's no risk with aircraft, and I use it intermittantly, but to tell you the truth, I can't remember when the radar has helped me yet. Maybe it will some day. The sonar does work, but I think the only way is to find something with the hydrophones, then switch and locate by sonar, but hydrophones seem good enough for me. Again, I think when using sonar, the enemy can detect it, so I generally just stick to hydro, plus once I can hear them, it doesn't seem necessary to use sonar at that point anyways.

Maybe somebody else can help you better. There's a few threads out there about it, but not much help IMO.

P.S.: I'm not sure if there will be an upgrade to a better radar. I was hoping that the earlier version just didn't work that good, but I'm not sure. Maybe somebody can enlighten us.

[U-104]

Radar no idea. Sonar allows you to get range to target without having to pop up your periscope.

[MothBalls]

The sonar, you have to be close enough to a target to see the ship type on the little notepad upper right of the wheel thingy.

When you have a contact, sit in the station. Ask the operator to report nearest contact or find it yourself. Dial it in and when you see the ship type in the upper right corner notepad, then you push the little button on the lower left corner. It will send a ping and give you the distance to target.

It's real handy if you have multiple targets. You can just about figure out location, heading and speed of a target if you ping it a few times. It's works great in poor visibility.


The radar kicks off in bad weather, usually when the waves wash over the bridge.

The radar helps in poor weather on the surface. If you have a radar detector, and you detect signals, then turn your radar off. They can see you. The radar detector is more valuable then the radar unit, imho.

If you have the 16k visibility mod, on the surface in daytime clear weather, the watch crew will usually spot a ship right around the same time the radar operator does. If you are using default or 8K, radar will detect things sooner. Radar is also great for detecting planes. It's strength is at night and in very bad weather.

As for looking at the dial, I sat there with known contacts near and played with all the thingy's. Short/long range, focus mode, blah, never did anything but the squigly lines. The screen is as useful as the little book in the captains cabinet. It's just there to make you click on it.

[Safe-Keeper]

One thing you should definetly get is the Radar Warning Receiver. It's saved peoples' hides so many times that it's scary.

Oh, and I suppose this is related: Anyone know how to read that radar screen? To me it's about as Greek as that encoded matrix stuff.

PS:
<-- Best avatar so far.

[Yahoshua]

Using that radar is an art........and unless you're a R/L radar operator, don't even bother trying to read it yourself.

You'd have to memorize every little "squiggle" that radar line makes in order to determine if you've found a ship or not. Let your Radio op. do that for you.

It's already been said that the radar works best in poor weather.....this is especially true in a blind fog.

I found use for it only until the allies got radar. Once the allies got radar, there's no point in using it since they WILL detect you before you detect them. (This is around early 1942).

After that, it's sonar only (has a decent range of 20 km which is capable of detecting contacts farther out than the early radar).

[Safe-Keeper]

Using that radar is an art........and unless you're a R/L radar operator, don't even bother trying to read it yourself.

You'd have to memorize every little "squiggle" that radar line makes in order to determine if you've found a ship or not. Let your Radio op. do that for you.

Ah, OK. Heh, I was starting to feel like .

[heartc]

I realize this is a thread resurrection, however I was searching for topics on the S-Gerät and only found this thread here.

I just tried it out in a patrol myself, and gotta say I'm totally floored. It works exactly as MothBalls described it above, EXCEPT that you have to hit the button multiple times (10+ times) in quick succession in order to get an acurate range, because the first few readings will most probably be bollocks. When the ranges increase or decrease only slowly and not by several hundred meters anymore (depending on aspect and speed of target of course) with each ping, you know you got accurate readings.

This device is totally ubber for sure. I've just sunk two lone merchants with it in zero visibility (15 m/s winds, heavy fog and heavy prec.), I never even saw them and neither had to. I just took two S-Gerät readings 6 minutes apart, thus got target course and speed, took a third one to be safe, varied a bit but only slightly, set myself up in a firing position, selected firing bearing, entered the according range, speed and AOB of this point into the TDC and once sonar reported target on pre-planned firing bearing, let lose my torps and hit the target at some 1.5 km out. I was tracking the torps on the sonar and they pretty much hit midships. Well the first engagement, because I wasn't quite sure about the accuracy, I fired a medium 4x spread, but it was a complete waste since 3 of them hit the target dead on and I suspect the 4th one only missed cause the target was already obliterated, slowing down, or simply too short (read in the logbook it was a small merchant). This is working so well it should be possible to get accurate hits on a steady target at max torpedo ranges. Only downside might be DDs will hear you pinging the crap out of the convoy, but this again would probably much depend on their AI level, the range, and of course which mod is used, if at all.

Either way, this device seems to work much better than its historical counterpart and might thus be seen as a bit of a cheat actually. From what I've read it wasn't very reliable nor working very well and they scrapped it. In the game however, it is actually working as well as the later Nibelungengerät might have iRL, which was devised for the Type XXI iirc.

[Schwuppes]

So don't merchants start zig zagging after you've pinged them?!
I would have thought they do...

[PavelKirilovich]

Schwuppes: A merchantman isn't going to detect the pinging, only warships equipped with hydrophones can hear the ping over shipboard noise and alert others.

I've had exactly one success with the radar. Night, no moon, and overcast. Because there's no way to make it any darker on the sea's surface than that, really. Thanks, mother nature. Seas are pretty calm, wind 5m/s, so I leave the Radar on. We make a contact ~25km away. I increase speed to ahead full. We intercept. I make a surface attack from a range of one kilometer, relying primarily on radar data and a stomachful of carrots to dimly make out the outline of the C2 merchantman. One torpedo later (Amidships, keel) and she's on the bottom.

The RWR (Radar Warning Reciever) has saved my life so many times I cannot begin to count. Generally speaking, if you get an RWR contact, your Funker/RADAR operator will shout out "Recieving Radar Signals!" At that point you crashdive immediately. I find a good tactic in shallow water is to hit C, then P. In other words, order a crashdive, then immediately thereafter periscope depth. You'll slip beneath the waves decently fast but in Stock at least, won't open the vents to the point that you're bound to hit 70m before you level off.

You'll have time to determine aircraft bearings using reference on the navmap, and approximate range that they acquired you at.

It is CRUCIAL to keep the RWR as late-generation as possible, according to your renown. This is because the Allies will update their RADAR sets to operate on different wavelengths, and if you cannot detect a centimetric wavelength, and they're using a centimetric set to track you, you are not going to know it until it's almost too late to evade.