The Bismarck had two seetakt 53cm wavelength radars on board mounted on the faces of the primary and secondary main battery rangefinders. These radars would give a reasonable range to the target but were essentially useless in bearing data being too wide beamed to be able to sufficently resolve bearing to a useful level. Additionally, they were not tied into the fire control system so their data had to be manually entered. They do make a useful backup to the optical rangetakers but that is about it.

The Yamato did not get a useful fire control radar until early in 1944 when some of the first production 2 Gô 2 Gata 4 Kai S sets became available. This set operated at 10 cm and gave excellent range data and fair bearing data. But, like the Seetakt set it was not tied into the ship's fire control system so any use of it had to be manually input. An additional problem was that the radar operator was not co-located with the optical rangetakers meaning that communications and coordination would be more difficult.

So, essentially both battleships would be relying on optical rangetaking for fire control with radar playing a role of giving a second set of range data to back up the optical inputs.