It has proven itself against fighters having used radar illumination as the only possible means of providing a target solution. Hardly a coincidence.. Someone wanted very much to see this fighter prevail..

It’s also proven itself against SAM threats and the inside word is that the level of SA is well beyond that of an F-22.

Again, check how much better Rafale scores overall compared to the Hornets in the Swiss leaks. It is more than “subtle”.

Sensor fusion is an important part of it, as is having excellent sensors. And no it is not trivial to implement. Where do you fit the IRST and all the other sensor on an old a/c? How do you reduce the RCS to allow for more effient EW techniques?

Have they tried an SH in the latest state though? What about when the APG-79 gets RF attack capability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/APG-79

What about an F-15E with the EPAWSS GaN AESA jammers?

Well they plan on fitting IRST to the F-22, which is theoretically far more difficult due to the need to maintain low RCS.

The F-35 is as operational as a phallus without testicles.. You can urinate.. and that’s about it..

Bureaucracy has hoops that need jumping through. In training it’s more than proven itself.

Your attempt at evading the matter is telling. You know, we spent decades building parabolic groud-based radar because parabolic antennas are as close as ideal as possible. Planar antennas have slightly worse characteristics (but are easier to integrate in an airplane). Worse characteristics only means that I was overly optimistic in my computation of the Typhoon radar beamwidth but as the formula I used is already a simplified one I didn’t see the point to try to account for what is a negligible factor.

Never changed anything, stop trying to put words in my mouth. You’re the one comparing single pulse accuracy in one case (RWR) and integrating over time (radar tracking).

Of course integration over time improves accuracy, for example that’s basically how a Synthetic Aperture modes works.

Never said such thing. How could I when I explain that radar and RWR don’t work on the same principles at all!

RWR will use other techniques like Kalman filtering to get a track. A track that will have great angular accuracy but quite poor speed/range estimates, that’s the nature of the beast.

What are you trying to say? When the beam arrives at the target, it is coherent (i.e. the beam impacting the target has a nice wavefront perpendicular to its traveling direction). The reflected signal is also coherent but as it strikes the AESA plane at an angle, the individual elements need to shift the phase of the signal they each receive to re-build the coherence for the receiver. If you don’t do that, you lose your antenna gain for the reception.

And yes, the shape of the target, errors in the shifters, modules mismatches or plain propagation weirdness mean that there will be some phase differences between the signals you’re summing. But that’s ok, that’s why radars don’t send a single ultra-short pulse but rather several long (well, everything is relative) pulses and the received signal is not one sharp square peak but rather a small (hopefully not too small) hilly peak and a lot of signal processing is done to translate these noisy returns into confirmed contacts.

Dunning-Kruger at its best.

By definition of a track, it requires multiple pulses.

In practice, monopulse mode works by slaving the antenna pointing mechanism* to the signal difference and this points the radar straight at its target after a few pulses.

Your mistake is thinking that the difference between the return signals are translated into an angle difference with the beam center (like saying “beamwdith is 5° and the delta in azimuth is xx so I know that my target is 2.3° below center so I know know it within 0.2°). This would require a very carefully calibrated radio chain which would be a waste because by slaving the antenna to the signal difference until it reaches zero, very accurate tracking can be achieved.

That’s the power of a closed feedback loop (it also means that Xeye jamming is going to break radar-lock very fast as well)

*or in the case of a missile like the AIM-120 or the MICA EM, it’s the missile controls that are slaved, the antenna is fixed and the whole missile is moving to point at the target (well, technically at a constant angle with the target)

Firstly, there is no decision yet on the EPAWSS.

https://www.scribd.com/document/283359838/EPAWS-AOC

“Among these differing approaches and opinions around the requirement for an efficient wide-band, high-power, jammer transmitter power source. While some have indicated a preference for a jammer configuration based on solid-state amplifiers, others have focused on a tube-type microwave power module (MPM) approach.“

Which is not surprising given that tubes have better power efficiency and linearity than transistors (at least until GaN modules are affordable).

As for your comment about having never heard of DRFM systems that aren’t AESA, well here are a few:

https://www.thalesgroup.com/sites/default/files/asset/document/Scorpion2.pdf
http://www.iai.co.il/sip_storage/FILES/0/36130.pdf

In a naval environment, MTBF between tubes and solid states are quite similar so it’s logical to go for tubes. For airborne systems it’s a tougher choice: lower MTBF (tubes) vs higher costs (GaN) vs lower performance (GaAs).

Dude just stop, you’ve been wrong on so much, it’s a joke by this point.

You were still wrong to use a calculation for a parabolic antenna and super wrong for equating beamwidth directly to angular accuracy… AND for saying RWR can use conical scanning and monopulse techniques.:highly_amused:

OMG. You did say that. You’re now official at troll status. Here is proof you said it LIAR! I recommend everyone put this guy on ignore otherwise you’ll have to keep going back to prove he said things that he later denies.

http://forum.keypublishing.com/showthread.php?140099-If-you-had-to-choose-between-Rafale-or-F-35&p=2342888#post2342888

So taking as example the Typhoon radar which operates at 10GHz and has a diameter of 70cm, its resolution is at best… 3×3 degrees.

It won’t be perpendicular to the direction of travel at all because it it were, you wouldn’t have a beamwidth measured in degrees now would you?:highly_amused: Yup, not disputed the second part but that doesn’t mean they can’t measure at each element first.

Not Dunning Kruger at all. You’ve made half a dozen errors so far, pointed out by 3 or 4 different people. Take a hint.

This is essentially how conical scanning works. It detects where the object’s edges lie.

I don’t see anything specifically stating that they’re tube, but fine, I hadn’t heard of them. But for DRFM, AESA jammers allow much better flexibility to match frequency and jam multiple sources simultaneously.

I haven’t heard of tubes out-performing GaAs. Most GaAs AESA radars are claiming superior range performance. I’d be inclined to take your word for it, but well, you’ve been wrong on so much so far.

No, I said that’s what the French perspective is.

To imply that it was 5th gen. Swiss perspective is that Gripen E is 2 gens ahead of M2K. Need I say more?

As already pointed out by Mercurius it was the crew of MH17 that requested the change of course due to weather.

The flight plan was for 33,000 feet until the waypoint PEKIT then climb to 35,000 feet. It was the crew of MH17 themselves that requested to maintain flight level 33,000 feet.

At 12.53 hrs MH17 was asked if it could climb to flight level 350 in accordance with the filed flight plan, but they replied that they were unable to comply and requested to maintain at flight level 330. This change of plan was agreed, and other aircraft in the area were told to climb to flight level 350 to avoid a potential separation conflict with MH17.

The crew of MH17 asked to divert the flight path by 20 nautical miles due to bad weather they could see on their route. MH17 then asked if flight level 340 was available. They were told that it was not available due to the other civilian aircraft being assigned heights in order to deconflict with MH17. That is why MH17 continued on its altitude of 33,000 feet.

The Russians agreed with the MH17 flight path in the preliminary MH17 report.

See page 11 of 34 2.1 History of the flight.

http://www.onderzoeksraad.nl/uploads/phase-docs/701/b3923acad0ceprem-rapport-mh-17-en-interactief.pdf

Well either way, a last minute divert over a war zone with a known active non-MANPADS SAM is really, really dumb and Ukrainian ATC was in a position to refuse it, as they should have, given that they were conducting ground attack over that region during that day.

Sigh.. we have discussed this before.

1. We don’t really know what those categories really mean
2. In any case they seem to be related to the “air policing” scenario which is probably less taxing than some of the other scenarios.
3. Sensor fusion was highlighted as one of the strong points of the Rafale and one (amongst several) weak points of the Typhoon.
4. Nobody has said that Typhoon does not have “sensor fusion”; the claim was that it was not quite as good was what is found in the Rafale.
5. Please notice how much better the Rafale (and in some cases the Typhoon) is performing compared to the Swiss Hornet, a very capable 4. gen fighter. Also notice that the difference in capabilities between the Hornet and the Rafale is going to grow as new capabilities are implemented on the Rafale including HMD, updates to SPECTRA, etc. etc. To me it makes sense to put the Hornet and the Rafale in slightly different generations (e.g. gen. 4 and 4.5). Notice that both the Hornet and the Rafale are somewhat large twin-engine fighters, and should therefore be very comparable — still, they are not when you look at their performance.

As said before, the Hornets are underestimated by many. And it seems the same goes for Rafale…?

That argument could just as well be used against the Rafale as for it. We don’t really know what was assessed, therefore a different set of criteria, may have the Rafale performing less well.

‘Not quite as good’ being the key phrase, i.e. just 0.25 different in this case.

Please notice how bad it’s performing relative to the Typhoon.

And things like the Detection, Ident, Acquisition, SA, EW and Comms axis will bulge out when the Typhoon receives Radar 2 and DASS P4E and the upgrades talked about in my post above.

Except it is operational?

So is the F-35.