a correspondent claims that iphone has uwb radar - any truth to that?

Ultra Wide Band is a type of radio that iPhones have that can be used with find my for precision tracking.

It does require you to be close to the lost device.

Ultra Wideband information - Apple Support

RADAR … Radio Detection and Ranging (circa 1940’s acronym)

UWB indeed uses radio signal Time of Flight for ranging …

… so it might “arguably” be called a type of RADAR - albeit one augmented with communications - but UWB wouldn’t normally be called RADAR in commonly accepted usage.

(i.e. A device which calculates range by a reflected signal’s total ToF “out and back” from/to a single transceiver)

See an interesting primer on UWB here:

https://www.inpixon.com/technology/standards/ultra-wideband

Many recent iPhones – all of the 11 through 16 series phones, with the notable exception of the iPhone 16e – have Ultra WideBand (UWB) radios. (There are countries and regions in which the feature is not available.)

Ultra Wideband availability - Apple Support

I do not see anything in Apple Support documents to indicate whether the phone uses the UWB radio as a "radar". The UWB radio is, however, required to do Precision Finding.

They're thinking about LiDAR for rangefinding etc

iphone 12 Pro and later top end models.

[Edited]

Sorry, saw that Johnathan Burger included the same information.