How Türkiye Built Its Own AESA Radars from the Chip Up
For most of its aviation history, the radar in the nose of a Turkish fighter came from somewhere else. The F-16 fleet flew with American sets, upgrades depended on foreign approval, and the most sensitive performance parameters stayed locked behind export licences. That picture has changed. A Turkish AESA radar now flies on the HÜRJET jet trainer, on the KIZILELMA unmanned combat aircraft and on a modified F-16, and a naval version is being prepared for the largest warship programme in the country’s history. Getting there took roughly a decade of quiet work on microchips, antennas and software, most of it led by ASELSAN.
This guide explains what AESA technology actually is, why so few countries have mastered it, and how Turkish industry built its own version from the semiconductor level up.
What Makes an AESA Radar Different from Older Designs
A traditional fighter radar works a bit like a lighthouse. A single transmitter generates a powerful radio beam, a mechanical gimbal physically swings the antenna dish left, right, up and down, and the radar “sees” wherever the dish happens to be pointing. It is proven technology, but it has hard limits. Moving parts wear out. The beam can only be in one place at a time. And if the single transmitter fails, the whole radar goes dark.
An active electronically scanned array, or AESA, removes the moving dish entirely. The antenna face is a flat panel packed with hundreds or thousands of small transmit-receive modules, each one a miniature radar in its own right. By adjusting the timing of the signal across all those modules, the radar steers its beam electronically, in microseconds, with nothing physically moving.
The practical consequences are what make air forces care. An AESA radar can track aircraft in one direction while mapping the ground in another, almost simultaneously. It can hop frequencies rapidly, which makes it far harder to jam or detect. It degrades gracefully, because losing a handful of modules barely dents overall performance. And it typically sees further and more precisely than a mechanically scanned set of similar size.
Why Türkiye Could Not Simply Buy the Technology
AESA radars sit near the top of every export control list. The United States restricts the technology tightly even among close allies, and the handful of other producers, among them France, the UK, Sweden, Israel, Russia, China, Japan and South Korea, guard it just as carefully. When Türkiye was removed from the F-35 programme in 2019, the message was hard to miss. Any future Turkish combat aircraft would need a Turkish radar, or it would fly with a permanent foreign dependency in its nose.
There was also a more immediate driver. The Turkish Air Force operates one of the largest F-16 fleets in the world, and the domestically run ÖZGÜR modernization programme was already replacing avionics, mission computers and displays with national equivalents. A modern fire control radar was the missing piece. Sensor independence was no longer an abstract industrial goal. It was a fleet-level requirement.
MURAD, the Radar at the Centre of Turkish Combat Aviation
ASELSAN’s answer is the MURAD family of fire control radars, developed under the coordination of the Presidency of Defence Industries (SSB). The first member to fly, the MURAD-100A, made its maiden flight on 15 February 2024 aboard an F-16 serving as the ÖZGÜR programme’s testbed. According to ASELSAN, the radar was developed with national resources from the chip level to final integration, and offers simultaneous air-to-air and air-to-ground modes along with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) ground mapping.
What stands out is how quickly the radar spread across platforms. Within roughly a year of that first F-16 flight, MURAD-100A had also flown on Baykar’s AKINCI armed UAV and on the KIZILELMA unmanned fighter jet. Variants are planned for the ANKA-3 flying-wing drone, for the HÜRJET jet trainer and light attack aircraft, and, in developed form, for the KAAN fifth-generation fighter. The same core technology scaled across manned jets, drones and trainers is exactly the pattern established AESA producers follow, because the expensive part, the modules and the processing chain, carries over from one antenna size to the next.
For the modernized F-16 ÖZGÜR fleet, an operational MURAD fit would be the most consequential upgrade of all. A fourth-generation airframe with a modern AESA radar and national beyond-visual-range missiles, such as the GÖKTUĞ family’s Gökdoğan and the longer-ranged GÖKBORA reported to be in development, becomes a substantially different combat aircraft, without a single new fuselage being built.
The HÜRJET Lock Test and What It Proved
In September 2026, SSB President Haluk Görgün announced that a MURAD-equipped HÜRJET prototype had detected and locked onto a second HÜRJET flying as a target aircraft. We covered the test in detail in our report on the HÜRJET MURAD radar lock test, but the short version is this: it was the first publicly confirmed air-to-air lock by a Turkish AESA radar against a real aircraft in flight, performed by two Turkish-built jets.
A single successful lock does not mean the radar is finished. Fire control radars have to prove themselves across dozens of modes, against manoeuvring targets, in cluttered low-altitude environments and under electronic attack, and that campaign will take time. What the test demonstrated is that the full chain works outside the laboratory, from the antenna and its transmit-receive modules through signal processing to track generation on a moving, vibrating platform. That is the point where an AESA programme stops being a technology project and starts being a weapon system.
GaN Chips, the Part of the Story Nobody Sees
The genuine bottleneck in AESA development is not the antenna shape or the software. It is the semiconductor inside each transmit-receive module. Modern arrays increasingly rely on gallium nitride (GaN), a material that handles far higher power densities and temperatures than the older gallium arsenide standard, which translates into longer detection range from the same antenna area.
GaN microwave chips for radar are on the most restricted end of export control regimes, so Türkiye had to build the supply chain itself. In December 2014, ASELSAN and Bilkent University established a joint GaN foundry, AB-MikroNano, to produce the semiconductor dies domestically. ASELSAN has since reported that domestically produced S-band GaN transistors are used in its EIRS early warning radar, and that both S-band and X-band power amplifiers come off the same national line. The company has also described a high-capacity serial production line for transmit-receive modules at its facilities in the Ankara region, sized for naval arrays that require tens of thousands of modules per ship set.
This is the least visible layer of the Turkish AESA radar effort, and arguably the most important one. Countries that assemble AESA radars from imported modules remain exposed to the same restrictions they were trying to escape. Owning the foundry means owning the radar. For a closer look at the companies involved across the whole sensor chain, see our overview of who builds Türkiye’s radars.
CAFRAD Takes the Technology to Sea
Fighter radars get the headlines, but the largest Turkish phased array project by sheer scale is naval. CAFRAD, the multifunction phased array radar system ASELSAN has been developing since the early 2010s, is the sensor suite intended for the TF-2000 air defence destroyer. The system combines a multifunction X-band array for tracking and missile guidance with a long-range S-band search radar and dedicated illuminators, in an arrangement broadly comparable to the radar suites on modern American and Chinese destroyers.
A land-based CAFRAD installation has been undergoing trials at the naval test site in Tuzla, and elements of the technology have reportedly been trialled at sea on the TCG Anadolu. Turkish officials have stated that construction of the first TF-2000 destroyer was set to begin with steel cutting in late 2025, with CAFRAD as its defining sensor. Reported detection ranges for the long-range component reach several hundred kilometres, though final specifications have not been officially published and should be treated with caution.
Early Warning Radars Built on the Same Foundations
The same AESA and GaN building blocks feed Türkiye’s ground-based air surveillance network. Under the ERALP project, ASELSAN developed the EIRS long-range early warning radar, an S-band AESA design with digital beamforming that is stated to detect ballistic missiles and low-observable targets at long range. The first system was delivered around 2023, and in May 2024 ASELSAN handed over the first ALP-300G, a transportable derivative that can be carried on an 8×8 truck and reportedly set up in about half an hour. These radars, together with the KORAL family on the electronic warfare side, form the sensing backbone of the layered air defence architecture Türkiye markets as Steel Dome; the jamming counterpart is covered in our piece on the KORAL-II electronic warfare system.
Where Meteksan Fits In
ASELSAN dominates the Turkish radar sector, but it is not alone. Ankara-based Meteksan Defence carved out a niche in millimetre-wave radar, a band suited to very compact, high-resolution sensors. Its MİLDAR fire control radar, developed for the T129 ATAK helicopter and accepted after testing in 2017, was Türkiye’s first fire control radar in the millimetre waveband. The company’s Retinar family of perimeter surveillance radars, light enough for a two-person crew to carry, detects a walking person at reported ranges of around four kilometres and has won export contracts in Europe. Meteksan’s systems are not fighter AESAs, but they show the Turkish radar base is broader than a single company, which matters for a sector where competition drives capability.
The Radars Still to Come
The next few years will show how far the ecosystem can stretch. MURAD has to complete its test campaign on HÜRJET and mature into the definitive sensor for KAAN, whose early blocks are expected to fly with progressively more capable radar fits. CAFRAD has to move from a shore installation to a warship under construction. And ASELSAN will need to keep scaling GaN module production to feed fighters, ships, early warning sites and export customers at the same time. Ten years ago, none of these radars existed outside design studies. The test flights now under way will determine how quickly a Turkish AESA radar becomes standard equipment rather than a first.
