The First Upgraded MEKO 200 Frigate Of Turkish Navy

Well the DHA story about the naval activity in Gölcük Naval Base was not completely useless.

MEKO 200 Track IIB Class frigate F-246 TCG Salihreis with her brand new Smart S Mk2 radar. Photo: Doğan Haber Ajansı.

This is the first public photo of the frigate TCG Salihreis with her brand new 3D Smart-S Mk2 radar. The last batch of 4 MEKO 200 frigates were delivered to Turkish Navy with AWS-9 3D radars of British origin.  A modernization program for the MEKO 200 class was started after Turkish decided to use Smart-S Mk2 radar in the first two ships of the Milgem class.

TCG Salihreis is the 4 ship in Turkish inventory to have this new radar. The other ships are F-511 TCG Heybeliada, F-512 TCG Büyükada and F-497 TCG Göksu.

The difficult and sometimes dangerous maintenance and the structural complexity of the AWS-9 radars does not make these equipment very popular among its users. So I expect that once the tests of this new radar are completed there will be other replacements too.