Plath GmbH

PLATH GmbH is a German company specialising in military radio monitoring and radiolocation, active internationally and with headquarters in Hamburg.
Overview.
The company specialises in communication intelligence for tactical (COMMS ESM) and strategic applications (COMINT) on the one hand, as well as applications for maritime routing and search and rescue support on the other. With its products and systems, and in association with various subsidiaries, PLATH GmbH covers the entire process chain for communication intelligence, from sensor systems to analysis and the evaluation of mass data. PLATH GmbH has ca. 180 employees and achieved revenues of €45 million in the 2016 business year. In 2009 PLATH GmbH was both ranked 49th. amongst the hundred global market leaders, as well as being named ‘Hidden Champion’ by VDI Nachrichten.
History.
In 1837 David Filby, an instrument-maker from Husum, founded a trading house for nautical instruments and maps, which was acquired in 1862 by Hamburg citizen Carl Christian Plath. Further reorganisations and investment followed, for example in the company Cassens & Bennecke, which, operating from 1909 under the name Cassens & Plath, was engaged in the sale of navigation devices in Bremerhaven, or Weems und Plath in Annapolis, USA, until C. Plath KG was founded in 1939. In 1950 C. Plath KG set up a department for the development of radio navigation in its so-called Compass House, a symbol of the port of Hamburg for decades. This department was headed by Maximilian Wächtler, regarded as a pioneer in radiolocation and radio and remote intelligence (recipient of the Rudolf-Diesel-Medaille), holding more than sixty patents in this field.
Following the incorporation of parts of the signalling company founded in Kiel in 1911, this department eventually became C. Plath GmbH – what is now PLATH GmbH. The PLATH group now encompasses PLATH and its subsidiaries innoSysTec, PROCITEC, PLATH EFT and PLATH AG. The group is now majority-owned by the Handelsgesellschaft Scharfe mbH & Co. KG family business.
C. Plath KG, on the other hand, became part of LITEF GmbH, now known as Northrop Grumman LITEF. Due to its origins and the many similar-sounding names, PLATH GmbH is often wrongly regarded as the successor of C. Plath KG and associated with compasses and other navigation devices. Previous managing directors of C. Plath GmbH included Mr. Pfaff, who was CEO from 1989 to 1997 and who, together with Oberst and D. Grabau, wrote some of the basic literature on communication intelligence, and which is still used today in the training of the German Bundeswehr's electronic warfare section and are standard intelligence literature.
Product lines.
PLATH GmbH is renowned primarily for the production of visual direction finders for navigation and the location of ships in maritime emergencies. In the days before GPS was invented, these devices were vital for finding one's position in maritime navigation. Together with Telefunken/DEBEG, who utilised components manufactured by PLATH, PLATH GmbH dominated direction-finding technology field in the 1950s and ‘60s. This dominance in the market was so great that radio direction-finding was explained in terms of the SFP7000 in the standard manual for maritime officers
Technical milestones.
Amongst the other innovations introduced by PLATH GmbH are e.g.: the maximum principle of the sight direction finder as well as patents for the first double-channel sight direction finder, procedures for the direction-finding and location of emitters in the event of frequency hopping or, more recently, procedures for the camouflaging of satellite navigation (GPS-Spoofing). More than 200 patents have been registered since the company was founded in 1954.