LINKOPING, Sweden, Aug. 24 (UPI) -- Britain's Ministry of Defense has ordered additional Giraffe AMB radars from Saab as well as upgrades to Giraffe systems already in use.

The contract is worth about $72.9 million. Deliveries will start this year and continue until 2018, SAAB said.


"We are delighted to have agreed this significant expansion and upgrade of the Giraffe AMB fleet with the UK MOD," said Micael Johansson, head of Saab's Electronic Defense Systems business. "We are looking forward to supporting both potential mission deployments and further system evolutions based on our spiral development plan for Giraffe."

The Giraffe system is a Passive electronically scanned array radar-based surveillance and air defense command-and-control system. It provides a full 360-degree update of the air situation to a distance of about 74 miles every second.

It was first acquired by Britain in 2008.

The upgrade to Britain's existing systems will enhance the radar's performance and capacity and will enable later addition of a capability to detect small unmanned aerial vehicles and screen out clutter, such as birds.