Airplane Jammers!

How do they work and what does it exactly do?

Does it make your plane stealth or ...???

basicly give me as much info as you can !!

Heres a link to a story
www.usatoday.com...

This is not exactly what i ment, but thx anyway!!

I ment jammers against radar systems or air-to-air missiles as well as survice-to-air missiles!!!

Originally posted by 187onu
This is not exactly what i ment, but thx anyway!!

I ment jammers against radar systems or air-to-air missiles as well as survice-to-air missiles!!!

Simple, broadcast noise (or carefully calculated interference in the best systems) on the same frequency that the system uses. Often these jam not only the radar, but the radio communications links to the seperate SAM batteries.

The best ECM (electronic counter measure) systems can insert just the right amount of noise to make the enemy think that their system is malfunctioning without letting them know they are being jammed.

So in other words, it can make a plane stealth as well?

Stealth? Yes and no.

I'll try to answer your question without going too deep. Radar works by sending out RF energy as waves. These waves bounce off solid objects and return the the radar receiver, where they are measured. Radar travels at the speed of light, so by timing the return you can calculate the range to the object. Some radars use the Doppler effect to measure the speed of an object. The Doppler effect causes waves from an object approaching you to appear to have a higher frequency and waves from an object traveling away from you to have a lower frequency. The horn of an approaching train is the classic example for Doppler shift. The radar has a transmitter and a receiver, and the two share time to create what's called a duty cycle. A radar may spend x amount of time transmitting, then 3x amount of time receiving, or 'listening' to see if it gets a return from the signal it transmitted. This would give a 25% duty cycle.

If you are able to transmit your own RF energy waves into a radar receiver you can fool it into thinking it has received a return different from you, or you can overwhelm it. If you know the frequency a radar operates at, you can simply blast a high power continuous signal of that frequency at the radar. This signal will overwhelm the radar because the radar will receive one constant return for the entire 'listen' phase of it's duty cycle. Since you are transmitting at a higher power than the radar is receiving it's own transmissions the jammer 'drowns out' the real radar return.

Some jammers will send echos, or multiple fast returns of about the same power and frequency of a normal radar return. This will cause the radar to think it is receiving returns from multiple objects when in fact there is only one.

Other jammers will distort the signal from the radar by increasing or decreasing the frequency of the return to give false speeds or other characteristics.

Back in the day a lot of early radars didn't have overload prtection circuitry so a jammer that was of sufficient power could actually fry a radar receiver and cause it to catch fire, like lightning destroying a TV set.

So there is a Stealth effect in the fact that the radar will not see the jammer, but it will know that there is something somewhere along that bearring that is jamming. It won't know the range to the jammer and therefore will not be able to track it.

There are a lot of ways to counter jamming as well. Many modern radars actually encode encrypted counters into the radar transmission. This way it can tell the difference between it's own transmission and the one from the jammer. Some radars use frequency hopping, where it uses several different frequencies to transmit at. It knows the order of the different frequencies it sent out, so it knows which ones to listen too. The jammer in this case would have to identify all the frenquencies used by the radar and figure up the frequency of use of each, then jam at those frequencies. This makes the jamming much less effective. Some radars will use both methods, encoding and frequency hopping. This seriously reduces the effects of jamming.

Some radars have a burnthrough mode, where the full power of the radar is used to overpower the jammer and receive returns. Here's a good example. You're in a dark room and someone turns on a maglight and shines it in your face. Suddenly you can't see anything but the maglight. You know someone is there but you can't see them. If you pull out a million candle power spotligt and shine it back at them, you will be able to see them.

When you light off a jammer it is only effective to hide objects in your immediate area, basically directly in front of you or directly behind you. An aircraft could fire a missile and assuming he had an effective jammer, he could jam the radar so the missile wasn't detected. An aircraft can jam an incoming missile so the missile can no longer track the aircraft.

Electronic warfare and electronic countermeasures are a really cool part of modern warfare. Each of the branches of the military have personnel specially trained for EW, ECM, and ECCM.

Well thank you very much , that was very educational !!

So its basicly a [cold] war between Radar/s and Jammer/s.

Im making a new topic about Kolgabra/Tamara, maybe you can help me out as well.

thanks

Btw, why isn't the AWACS shot down or detected yet (if it havent'). I mean its big a # and doens't have a stealth deisgn AT ALL (looking at pics)!

AWACS aircraft are detected - there great big radars send out signals for hundreds of miles

and that teh thing - say your RWR picks up a track from an awacs - that awacs will be hundreds of miles away , safely behind a fighter screen

Because an AWAC's has very sophisticated anti-missile systems, if your going to shoot it down the AWAC's will pick you up before you can get in range and the AWAC's will alert fighters to intercept you.

...................

thanks anyway

[edit on 23-4-2005 by 187onu]

Originally posted by WestPoint23
Because an AWAC's has very sophisticated anti-missile systems, if your going to shoot it down the AWAC's will pick you up before you can get in range and the AWAC's will alert fighters to intercept you.

That's it exactly. The AWACS can see you a long time before you can see them, and can do several things. It can simply manuever to stay out of range of your radars. It can (and will) vector fighters to take you out before you detect the AWACS. And it has an impressive array of ECM, ECCM, and flares/chaff to decoy incoming missiles.

pussy AWAC's .........

Back to the threat, the "Tamara/Kolgabra" can operate allthough there being jammed, so what can be done against these systems??

Sorry for asking maybe its just me but WTF is the Tamara/Kolgabra?





West Point, Out.

The Tamara is a sensor system developed by a Czech company that detects electronic emmissions and is supposedly capable of tracking stealth aircraft. The company that makes the Tamara went out of business in 1998. It is widely believed that the Tamara tracked and shot down the F-117 that crashed in Kosovo but there is no verification of this.

I can understand using electronic emmissions from aircraft to detect them, but not to get enough data to allow firing at an aircraft. The USN has a system called the SLQ-32 which is a passive EW sensor used to listen for radars and comms. It only provides a bearing to the emitter, it can't track a target. The SLQ-32 can be used along with a radar to identify the types of targets the radar sees. The radar picks up a target, the SLQ-32 listens to it, identifies the radars the target is using, and then this is coorelated to a database to ID the target. Maybe Tamara can actually track a target, but if so it is at a higher level than the radar theiry that I know.

Yea its a passive Radar system that can operate even when its jammed.
it can detect a target at 450km, it detect a plane or whatever stealth so that they pilote won't know its detected or locking on!
its very small to (a jeep) so its easy to hide whereever!

The stuff I read about the Tamara said it was mounted on several large trucks. The Pentagon seemed concerned about it, but skeptical as well.

It's true that a passive radar can't be detected by pilots, because the Tamara isn't a radar. It doesn't transmit anything, it just listens. It picks up the emmissions from aircraft and apparently somehow is able to determine enough data from the emmissions to calculate a fire control solution. I'm still skeptical about those claims. I just don't see how range can be determined from a passive system, unless three or more of them several miles apart are used to triangulate on the target, and even that wouldn't give the accuracy required for firing.

After the Tesla company that made the Tamara went out of business they had two remaining radars in their stocks that soon 'disappeared'. Iraq had tried to purchase one when the company was still in business and the CIA discovered this and blocked the sale. It was believed that Iraq bought the two 'missing' ones. If that is true, they didn't help to shoot down any stealth aircraft in Iraq, and there were a lot of them there.

Yea the Tamara system can triangulate the aircraft! there three systems, but its the size of a jeep (a littlebit bigger), I seen pictures of it!
I dont know if its enough data to shoot it down but I gues otherwise why would they have made it??
but it does make sence, if your calling a celll phone I can triangulate your phone as well, so ...

187onu you make a lot of claims, but do you have any hard proof or evidence that it does what you are saying or is it just speculation.

Originally posted by 187onu
Yea the Tamara system can triangulate the aircraft! there three systems, but its the size of a jeep (a littlebit bigger), I seen pictures of it!
I dont know if its enough data to shoot it down but I gues otherwise why would they have made it??

but it does make sence, if your calling a celll phone I can triangulate your phone as well, so ...

The Tamare has is definitely NOT the size of jeep, it's much bigger. It can triangulate the position, but the effectivity depens on many factors. And it almost certainly cannot triangulate F-117, because it uses only pasive systems.




[edit on 24-4-2005 by longbow]