Hello Everyone,
Most military aircraft are equipped with their own radar. The question I have is when you have two or more fighter aircraft flying together how does their individual radar signals work. Meaning does each radar unit have a unique signal and will only display information from that particular unit or will each radar pick up the return signals from all of the individual radar units?
The lead plane is doing all the navigating & weather avoidance. All the other pilots are watching the plane beside them with 100% concentration to hold formation.
If they are all spread out, they still follow the leader. IIRC
I have no idea how 2 or more RADAR units within 20’ of each other would deal with all the signal bounce. The units are usually identical in identical aircraft…
Why would they have them on?
If flying IFR & not in a formation, they would be following normal IFR separation rules & it would be no problem as then you are dealing with miles of separation.
Fighters normally keep their RADAR emitters off. Having your emitter on tells everyone where you are. RADAR receivers are another matter.
I haven’t worked with radars on fighter jets but I have worked with radars on airborne search aircraft. Basically a radar works by sending out a pulse of energy at the speed of light and then listening for a return. It does this many times per second. Another radar nearby can cause a little bit of interference but generally not enough to be a problem. We used to get “spoking” if there was another search aircraft within 100 miles of us. Spoking shows up as a spiral pattern on the radar screen. Modern digital radars encode the transmitted pulse, ours didn’t do anything special but I see no reason why a military radar couldn’t have a unique pulse signature.
I was a radar tech on AWACS (an airborne radar system).
The radar on MOST airplanes are just for weather. They don’t see/show planes.
Radar can NOT determine friend or foe - radar signal is determined by; size, shape, material and distance. A boing 747 far away looks just like a lear jet that’s closer.
Airplanes move so much faster than weather, and are so small that they don’t show up on weather radars.
Radar can’t see things real close - it takes time to transmit before it can ‘listen’.
Radars have filter circuitry to deal with interference of other radars.
I haven’t given it much thought, but I thought that the reason weather radar (e.g., as carried on many aircraft) didn’t ‘see’ aircraft because of the frequency; not because of their speed. As far as size goes, I know that radiation interacts with things similar to its wavelength.
If anyone can post a definitive primer on why aircraft don’t show up on weather radar, I’d appreciate it.
Weather and aircraft radar systems are designed and made differently to see the different ‘targets’.
Like binoculars and telescopes - similar but different.
Right. But I think it has to do with the frequency, and not with the size of the target.
Well, it doesn’t interact much with things much smaller than its wavelength - but larger is no problem.
For example, light reflects off all sorts of large objects, and then arrives in your eye to be detected by cells that are small, but still substantially larger than its wavelength.
If all else fails, the lead plane might have their radar emitter on (assuming they didn’t have a search radar either on the ground or on a plane like an AWACS platform), with his wingmen having their emitters off, with the radar simply tracking in passive or “listening” mode. They’d pick up the lead’s radar returns about as well as he would, most likely.
Well it can’t be speed because from the radar’s point of view the weather is traveling just as fast as an aeroplane does. I can vaguely recall something about the lower size limit of a target being half the wave length of the radar pulse but I’m not sure.
Disregard that, I think I was getting confused with the minimum range of the radar which is half the pulse width.
