Vampire EW.

VAMPIRE was an electronic warfare fit rather than a separate model: standard 24-volt radio-body FFR 101 Forward Controls were converted in the United Kingdom and then shipped to Germany. The name is usually expanded as Vehicle Army Mobile Position Interferometry Radio Equipment, though much of what the vehicles actually did remains covered by the Official Secrets Act, and the published accounts come from the crews rather than from released documents.

Externally a Vampire is a radio-bodied 101 with a large antenna array on the roof and a telescopic mast; internally the body is screened and insulated, and the equipment fit varied by role even though the vehicles all looked identical from outside. They worked in a 'baseline' of four, parking up in woodland with the masts raised just above the treetops and taking cross-bearings on Warsaw Pact transmissions — interferometric direction finding, from which the acronym comes.

The fleet is generally given as twenty-one vehicles: four troops of five, plus one squadron 'Probe' vehicle for forward reconnaissance, with perhaps twenty-two at most. Some accounts put the number as low as nine to eighteen. They served with 14 Signal Regiment (Electronic Warfare), latterly out of Celle in Germany; documented individual histories show one arriving on 14 Signal Regiment's books in July 1984, another entering service as late as 1987, and vehicles moving to 237 Squadron at Hullavington in 1993 and then to Brawdy in South Wales in 1996.

Beneath the body they are ordinary 101s — 3.5-litre Rover V8, four-speed LT95 gearbox, permanent four-wheel drive and Salisbury axles on 5.57:1 differentials — built in the 1975–78 production run. They were cast around 1999 as the 101 fleet was retired, four being auctioned at Newport at about that time; the specialist masts and equipment were stripped before disposal. Fewer than half of those built are thought to survive, one reportedly having been destroyed in the 2005 Buncefield fire, and surviving vehicles have gone to collectors in the UK and the United States.