Weather radars have revolutionised our understanding of both large and small scale precipitation processes, and are having a similar effect on real-time hydrological modelling. Dual-pol is revolutionising the field of weather radar, and is almost a panacea for many of the historical problems, such as attenuation, quantitative precipitation estimation and hydrometeor type classification. However not everywhere in the country has useful radar coverage, and in some areas dual-pol by itself won’t improve the situation. The alpine areas in SE Australia have some of the highest precipitation accumulations and spatial gradients in accumulation nationally, and provide water to a large part of Australia’s food growing regions, yet during the wettest seasons of winter and spring these areas currently don’t have any useful radar coverage. The meteorology during these periods and orography in the alpine areas dictate that many smaller short-range radars are required to provide useful coverage of the area instead of a few long-range radars a long distance from the catchments of interest. The challenges of obtaining good radar coverage for quantitative precipitation estimation in the Snowy Mountains are investigated.