DRDO and PSU's

[Bhartiya Sainik]

Dear mods, you've not moved the replies yet so i'm replying here. You can move whever you want. Perhaps you can open a thread on EW.

The topic of the discussion was "Can EWs be engaged" and my response was "Yes, using PRH". So it doesn't make much sense to divert into this as we're already spamming an unrelated thread. Because then we'd have multiple things to discuss upon ranging from SWaP, to attenuation, to the fact that a laser can only engage one missile at a time, and so on.

EW is an umbrella under which many things can be covered. Microwave is part of RF spectrum, so overlap b/w EW & DEW. Read my sentence again: "IDK if LASER can be used in DIRCM then if MASER/RASER can be used in DRFCM or not."
The focus is on MASER, not LASER which i used for analogy. Your comprehension is opposite.

This "burn" thing is both an older phenomenon and also something that got "miss translated" with it travelled from military to civilian domain.

When a regular/average citizen like me notices a thin fuse wire getting burned by current spike then knowing the theory of step-up/down transformer with coils, one can wonder if over-radiation can affect sensitive PRH antenna element.

And even if there's such thing as a radar/jammer (not a DEW) buring a seeker then a seeker too has some tricks up its sleeves.

Ofcourse, a missile would also have some minimum defence but not making it too costly.
I only know about some basic pic & diagrams of Missile electronics, bands, some ECM capability:

RF proof electric components, thermal management, automatic gain control, frequency filtering, narrow directional antennas, pulse management, frequency selective radome, limiter circuit, the good ol' diodes.

Kindly elaborate on individual things whatever you know:
RF proof electric components - i guess sealing electronics in metal casing protects it from EMP. IDK if radome can protect the PRH element.
Thermal management - IDK if RF seeker can be cooled like IR seeker. Filling with cold gas?
Freq. selective radome - i already mentioned that & a missile seem to operate in 1 or 2 bands only.
Narrow directional antenna - But the missile seeker need to have certain conical angle envelope as it needs to track the target & maneuver.
Auto gain ctrl., Freq. filter, Pulse mgmt., limiter circuit - these things are H/w & S/w features which come after the reciever element has converted RF wave to electric signal to process.

That's not how towed decoys works, they simply "seduce" an ARH missile by imitating the RCS of the plane.
Here's a basic idea of the hypothetical engagement of an EW platforms by an PRH
1. Neutralizing the Jamming Pods
The R-77P uses its PRH seeker to lock onto the jamming signal emitted by the Growler's AN/ALQ-99/249 pods...by exploiting the fact that jamming pods emit far stronger signals than the decoy because of SWaP constraints.
You can always add algorithm based filtering to ignore less powerful or irrelevant signals.

But then it would mean that towed decoys are useless.
And now they are trying to make SDB(Smal Diameter Bomb) sized decoys, cruise missile sized decoys, basically a pod with engine & wings, to CCA(Colaborative Combat Aircraft) sized drones for EW including decoy function.

2. Frequency Hopping Resistance:
Nowadays ECM and ECCM through adaptive algorithms are standard on all Passive Radar Homing missiles. With AI, the processing time to select the most "lucrative" frequency out of the whole chaos of frequencies would beat the time it takes to hop.

Well, ECCM is way too deep for me but AFAIK the frequency selection is random, not "most lucrative". The hopping can happen from few 100s to few 1000s of times per second, like in Bluetooth.
If a PRH covers wide band then it can catch multiple frequencies. IDK how an antenna element of 1 band electrically reacts to other band wave.

3. "Burn-Through":
ECM pods are designed to jam radars atleast hundred kilometres away so they need to put in a lot of power to compensate for things like attention. A side-effect of this is the phenomenon called Burn-Through...when the missile closes in to within a certain range, the noise-to-signal ratio increases, making the jammer more vulnerable as its location becomes more apparent.

Again, if that is so simple then just like towed decoy a jammer is also useless in front of PRH using HOJ.

4. Differentiating Plane from Decoy (the point you raised)
Almost all the towed decoys currently in service like ALE-50 or 55 are specifically designed to mislead missiles by mimicking the aircraft’s radar cross-section (RCS) and emissions. They can't lure a HOJ missile, what they can lure is a missile that's using Active Radar Homing to search for a RCS of say J-10 from its threat library by mimicking that same RCS some tens of metres away from the actual plane. Because of how small an ALE-50 is compared to AN/ALQ-99, it can never emit the same amount of power.

AN/ALQ-99 has power o/p of 10.8 KW. I couldn't find power of ALE-50.
Agreed after looking at their diagrams that pod is more powerful bcoz the pod jammer powered by RAT (Ram Air Turbine) works continiously but AFAIK the towed decoy powered by battery works for short period during terminal phase when the jet has detected the missile & instructed the decoy via fiber-optic link. IDK if there's stealthy way of providing it electricity.

So it seems the HOJ missile can be defeated only if somehow its seeker is fried by over-radiation hoping that it doesn't have effective tricks or by DEW.
At least AIM-120 has HOJ switching capability. IDK about Meteor, Astr-1,2,3, Chinese AAMs.

 

[jaijaganath]

View: https://x.com/Rethik_D/status/1869013204346847374

View: https://x.com/Rethik_D/status/1869014001763729859

 

[Bhartiya Sainik]

View: https://x.com/Rethik_D/status/1869013204346847374

View: https://x.com/Rethik_D/status/1869014001763729859

But nobody precisely lists the features of 5.5gen b/w 5 & 6.