The SCR-584 (short for Set, Complete, Radio # 584) was an automatic-tracking microwave radar developed by the MIT Radiation Laboratory during World War II.

In September of that year, a British delegation, the Tizard Mission, revealed to US and Canadian researchers that they had developed a magnetron oscillator operating at the top end of the UHF band (10 cm wavelength/3 GHz), allowing greatly increased accuracy.

Alfred Lee Loomis, running the Rad Lab, advocated the development of an entirely automatic tracking system controlled by servomechanisms.

They were also able to take advantage of a newly developed microwave switch that allowed them to use a single antenna for broadcast and reception, greatly simplifying the mechanical layout.

In close contact with the Rad Lab, Bell Telephone Laboratories was developing an electronic analog gun-director that would be used in conjunction with the radar and servo-actuated 90 mm anti-aircraft guns.

They began replacing the earlier and more complex SCR-268 as the US Army's primary anti-aircraft gun laying system as quickly as they could be produced.

By the end of the war they had been used to track artillery shells in flight, detect vehicles, and reduce the manpower needed to guide anti-aircraft guns.

When they moved onto the topic of radar, the British team was surprised to learn that the US was in the process of developing two systems similar to their own existing Chain Home, the Navy's CXAM and the Army's SCR-270.

The US delegates then mentioned the Navy's work on a 10 cm wavelength radar, which could provide the required resolution with relatively small antennas, but their klystron tube had low power and was not practical.

He explained that it also worked at 10 cm wavelength, but offered higher power - not just than the Navy klystrons, but even the US's existing long-wave radars.

They also began developing the other technologies presented at that meeting, including an aircraft interception radar and a radio navigation system that became LORAN.

A formal proposal for a SCR-268 replacement was made by the Signal Corps in January 1941, by which point the RadLab had already formed what they knew as Project 2 to develop this advanced gun laying radar.

At the same time, British and Canadian teams began work on versions of a simpler system that they hoped to deploy by 1942 -- the GL Mk.

The SCR-584 was first used in combat at Anzio in February 1944, where it played a key role in breaking up the Luftwaffe's concentrated air attacks on the confined beachhead.

The SCR-584 was no stranger to the front, where it followed the troops, being used to direct aircraft, locate enemy vehicles (one radar is said to have picked up German vehicles at a distance of 26 kilometers), and track the trajectories of artillery shells, both to adjust the ballistic tables for the 90 millimeter guns, and to pinpoint the location of German batteries for counter-battery fire.

From 14 July 1944 until 27 October 1944 they were attached to Sec 1 Co A, 555th Sig Aircraft Warning Battalion and served in fluid, forward positions.

Davenport waterproofed a number of the radar sets so that they could be carried aboard the Allied armada launching the Normandy landings on D-Day.

Both of these had been requested by AA Command and arrived in numbers, starting in June 1944, just as the guns reached their free-firing positions on the south eastern coast of England.

[9] Using this pedestal, the DOWs created the first maps of tornado winds, discovered hurricane boundary layer rolls, and pioneered many other observational studies.

One is found at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, where the 584 pedestal is the platform for the new Shared Mobile Atmospheric Research & Teaching Radar, or SMART-R. American engineer and convicted spy Morton Sobell stole plans for the SCR-584 and provided them to the Soviet Union.