Tejon RCS test

Given the high noise factor of recent posts (OK, too much Dulce crapola!), I figured I submit this photograph of a test at the Tejon Ranch RCS west of Edwards AFB.

test at Tejon Ranch RCS Northrup facility

I wasn't going to bother posting it due to the thermal blur, but at least we have some reality to discuss. The photograph was taken on Oct 13, 2010. I need to find a better spot to shoot the pylon, preferably one with more altitude since much of the thermal distortion is due to shooting over land rather than air well above land. I tried shooting from near the LA electric power towers, but you can't see the pylon from there.

I don't think they are testing a structure on the pylon. I don't believe they would have wires going to a structure under test. Rather I think they are testing the signal strength at the pylon, perhaps part of a calibration. Just an educated guess, i.e. I could be wrong and this is the shape of future stealth, but I don't think so.

Unlike Helendale, the Tejon facility doesn't have that underground chamber where the test article pops out of the ground. It looks like they have to mount the test article on the pylon with a crane.

Great topic and you're totally right about the Dulce bollocks.

On topic, could the cable be providing some kind of electricity to power a system that's then tested for emissions?

Great site BTW.

reply to post by DeltaNine


Basically you are saying use the RCS in reverse. I will give that theory a "maybe". I think they would only do emission testing on a completed aircraft. I'm not sure how you would scale the source of the leak.

Or are you saying blast the device under test and see what RF enters?

There is/was some plan to build on the Tejon Ranch, essentially rezone it. I haven't followed this lately. Anyway, Kern County assembled some information on the facility. Most of the report is stuff pulled off the internet (which we all know is the source of all things true). Here is the document:
Tejon Ranch info
The report is a combination of Northop's own website and believe it or not an archive of Tom Mahood's old Bluefire website. There is some stuff from Kern county personnel stating they couldn't get on the property due to nasty security guards. [If you drive to the facility using it's northern entrance, expect to see security guards in white trucks with Tejon (maybe Tejon Ranch) on the side. They don't see to patrol the southern entrance, probably because they could intercept an intruder from that direction way before they reach the guts of the facility.] In the report, they indicated the land is taxed as agricultural and the improvements to the land are not taxed. Gee, that kind of deal would cut my tax bill substantially. ;-)

I'm thinking more for radar and the like to see what leaves the device when they switch to the low/no emissions mode (I forget the actual term for it).

That said, I've no idea what goes on at that place so I might be completely wrong

reply to post by DeltaNine


You are probably thinking of low probability of intercept radar. I don't think they would test that at a RCS. For developing avionics, they generally take some conventional plane and load it with the gear. Northrop has a plane that shows up on flightaware as voodoo1. The flight ID is not exclusive to that plane.

A facility like site-4 south of the TTR (Have Glib) checks how the plane radar appears to ground units of a foreign source. N105TB probably has this capability for use in the air.

As a bit of background, to be stealthy, you need to be difficult to detect by active and passive techniques. The shape of the plane is optimized via the RCS testing and development to be difficult to detect via active sensing. You ping the plane with radar and detect the echo. The smaller the cross section, the weaker the echo. Passive detection of aircraft attempts to sniff the radar ping emitted by the plane. These days the signal emitted by the plane is very complicated to avoid detection. They hop frequencies, stuff like that. If you don't know the frequency to detect, you need to search over a wider bandwidth to find the signal. Noise is proportional to the square root of the bandwidth, so as you search wider, the noise increases and thus the signal to noise ratio decreases.