![]() ![]() Radar, like life, is full of tradeoffs.Īn important thing to note is that a radar lock is not always mandatory to release weapons at a target. It’s the aircraft’s way of telling you, “OK, I can both track this target, and scan for other targets, but in return, I’m only going to scan a 40° wide cone in front of the aircraft, instead of the usual 60°. In the above photo you can see two vertical bars spanning the height of the display - these are the azimuth scan limits. In the end, a radar is only as powerful as it is, and you can put a lot of radar energy on one target, or spread it out weakly throughout the sky, or some compromise in between. Note that all of this comes with tradeoffs. In this mode, the radar beam sweeps the sky, while briefly and regularly pausing its scan to check up on a locked target. ![]() A radar in SAM combines both tracking and scanning to allow a pilot to track one or a small number of “interesting” targets while not losing the big picture of what other targets are doing. This is demonstrating an advanced feature of modern radars, situational awareness modes. Note that in the above picture, the bottom-most (closest) target is locked (circle around it), the two targets further away are tracked (yellow squares), and there are two radar returns even further away (white bricks). With this information, the pilot gets a much better idea of what the aircraft is doing, but at the expense of information about other aircraft in the area. Its aspect angle (angle between its nose position and our nose position) is 160° to the left,.This is what the F-16’s fire control radar display looks like when a target is locked:Īlong the top we have a lot of information about what our radar target is doing: Because the radar is actually tracking a target, and not just displaying bricks when it gets a reflection back, it can tell the pilot a lot more about the target. In track mode, the radar focuses its energy on a particular target. This will put the radar into a track mode. The pilot is ready to lock up this target. Note that the cursors are over the bottom-most brick (closest to our aircraft). This is displayed as the small white trend line originating from each brick.) (There is one exception: The Doppler shift of the radar return can be measured, to estimate how fast the aircraft traveling towards or away from you, much like the pitch of an inbound train’s whistle can tell you how fast it’s coming at you. Because the radar is only scanning, not tracking, no other information is available about the radar targets. This is an example of the fire control radar display for an F-16 Fighting Falcon when the radar is in a search mode:Įach white brick is a radar return. In search mode, no single aircraft is being tracked, but the pilot can usually tell generally what a particular radar return is doing because with each successive sweep, the radar return moves slightly. When the radio beam is reflected by a target aircraft, an indication appears on one of the pilot’s radar display. In search mode, the radar sweeps a radio beam across the sky in a zig-zag pattern. Aircraft monitors generally have two modes: search and track. Otherwise there is no way to know when to call "Timeout".The main technology that a military aircraft takes advantage of to lock on and track an enemy aircraft is its onboard mounted radar. Of course if you cut the missile loose, the computer has no way of knowing and I believe it just continues to countdown based on last known maneuvers. Unless I'm misunderstanding how the Viper works, at Fox3 - you should get a countdown to Active and then once it goes active, it should then switch the countdown to impact. 1) I had an almost 0 % PK on the bandit on numerous occasions and 2) it didn't continue to count down to impact. I snipped it when it went to A0 and then notched but noticed two strange things. At pickle, there was an A14 and it gradually counted down, although somewhat erratically. I was playing with the AIM-120s a bit the other day and I was seeing what I assumed to be the time to active countdown in the HUD. If an older gen fighter with shorter range radar missiles, Heaters only or a bomber - you might support it to impact just to increase the Pk. If an aware bandit with a long range radar missile - then you would most likely F-Pole and support to active and then notch or drag out. Depends mostly on your tactical gameplan and who you're going up against. The answer to your questions, as always, depends. ![]() Since the timer showing the remaining time till the AMRAAM goes active is not working right now, I would like to know how you guys handle this in combat.ĭo you break lock at a certain time of the count down and hope for the best? ![]()
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