Astra — Building Important Blocks in Critical Domains of Defence

Astra Microwave was started by three Microwave Engineers in the year 1991. The founders had taken voluntary retirement from their illustrious careers in DRDO labs and started this organisation with an objective of making critical RF and Microwave components and sub-systems indigenously. Back then, all critical components had to be imported and as these are the important building blocks of military systems, they were being imported by the country at exorbitant costs.

Astra Microwave today is one of the only companies in India that works in all critical domains of the defence RF and Microwave industry. They supply critical RF and Microwave Products that are used in Military Radars – Ground, Naval and Airborne, Electronic Warfare systems for Army, Navy and Airforce, Strategic Missile programs and for Telemetry applications. In parallel Astra also works with Indian Space Research Organisation for space qualified RF and Microwave sub-systems for major Communication, Geo-synchronous and remote sensing satellites.

As Astra JMD M.V. Reddy explains, “Major contributions have been made to the Airborne Early Warning and Control Aircraft for all major sub-systems of the primary radar, for the Uttam AESA radar where we have built the Active Antenna Array and all its electronic backbone, major contribution to the EW PODS on the LCA, major contributions to the Naval EW programs like Samyuktha, Himshakthi, Nayan etc. Apart from this, we have been one of the important suppliers for all ground and naval radars built by LRDE and then productionised by BEL. We have been part of major missile programs like Akash, Astra, Brahmos, AGNI, Nag etc. We have also contributed to several telemetry and weather based products for DRDO and IMD. Taking advantage of the offset requirements of the Indian Government, we have also supplied several critical modules for export customers in Israel, France, USA etc. for important systems that ultimately come back to India like MPR, MFCR and P-8I.”

In their journey from a startup to a 600 crore company, Astra has successfully overcome several high technology challenges and today they are amongst the very few Indian private sector companies whose core strength is technology in major areas of the defence and space market in India. This journey has seen them being rewarded by the Indian Government’s Scientific department for indigenous R&D, by Electronics Industry Associations and Independent Media agencies for Business Excellence, R&D and Quality. Today Astra is well poised to realise any high end product in India using indigenous technology and are working their way up to the systems domain.