Harlikwin

Needs more Patrick!

Yeah this is my interpretation of the documents we have. Moreover the "flase" signals displayed are what actually happens when the SPO starts to go out of synch. As for how ED implements this correctly, IDK. Maybe just a special option to fly with the broken SPO. And then have a "perfect SPO" as the default option. Ideally maybe they have errors that start to appear (desynch) after some random amount of flying time. What we lack is info on rapidly the spo would desynch, could be minutes, or tens of hours. And then to reset it, well that takes a radar technician to reset it with his gear.

Yeah, honestly the different country jets were typically pretty different. Dassault customized alot. Personally I want an Iraqi EQ-4 or 6... 'ing super mirage, plus the Iraqis modded them to-the-max... And I buy it as a separate module.

This is a separate issue. And well at a guess we won't have AI GCI or whatever its going to be for a while. I'd much rather have a SPO that actually works when the radar is on, even though having used it a bunch with the radar off, its fairly sus/useless anyway, but its modeled correctly in that regard as far as I can tell. The whole it doesn't work with the radar on is the main point of contention.

Exactly. From what I can determine. The blanker board basically is just programmed to turn off the input to the SPO in 3 microsecond intervals (the length of the TX of the N019). This isn't hard to do its a very simple on/off circuit. The issue seems to be "synching" that with the radar itself. Because if its off by a few tens of nanoseconds that signal will get detected as a strong X band signal. This is the cause of the "spurious" signals as described in above manuals and quotes. So thats something that "MAY" happen. In a well tuned set or system it wont. The whole it just shuts off totally might be some "self protect" mode for the SPO if the radar goes out of synch entirely. Given the lack of spare parts in the 90's and 2000's for this, its very easy to believe ED's SME's jets were just broken, because you don't really need an RWR in peactime. They probably just turned the whole thing off. BUT, its not how it would work in a perfectly maintained jet, which is the DCS standard for every other module. Like I'm sure the F4 RWR was probably janky AF at times when maintenance didn't do their job due to lack of parts/time. But it works "as it should" in DCS.

SPO-15 was modular and cassete based to interface with different jets which all had different blanking requirements for radars, IFF, radios, DL etc, so the Sapfir-23 thing makes no sense, the mig29 had to have its own "interface" card as it used different IFF, radios etc as well.

SU-24 also has a MPRF attack radar suite that seems to work fine with it as well, in case anyone wants to go down that rabbit hole.

Respectfully man, that doesn't make any sense. The cable from the N019 is sending the synch signal, thats all it needs to do, be it HPRF, or MPRF or LPRF. its a couple of of Khz PRF... Thats not a problem to blank or synch anything for 70's electronics at all. The SU-24 attack radar is MPRF and there are no reports of that not working. Plus Cartridges 51 and 54 are "modular" its a cartridge. So its not going to be the same for each jet, each jet has different systems/radios that need to get blanked. Be that IFF, Radios, navigation gear, or different radars. We also have a excerpt from a 29 manual now that says its ONLY blanked during TX. specifically in a mig29 manual. ALL the blanking circuit does is tell the SPO when the radar is in TX, thats the entire purpose of that circuit. При включении изделия H0I9 на излучение происходит блокировка изделия Л006 (первого диапазона передней полусферы) для исключения его срабатывания от изделия H0I9. When the N0I9 product is switched on for radiation , the L006 product (the first range of the front hemisphere) is blocked to prevent it from being triggered by the NOI9 product. Can this go out of synch? possibly, or more than likely probably, which then screws up the SPO in terms of spurious signals which is certainly possible with 3 microsecond TX 3 microsecond RX. if you are off by a fraction of a microsecond the TX signal will start to flood the SPO. Which is where the various warnings of "spurious" signals come from. Most likely if hits some power threshold there is a protection circuit to shut it off entirely. Yeah a central oscillator is how its generally done in western designs. Not surprised the Soviets are doing it too, cuz its the smart way to do anything like this requiring a master synch. Yeah, because respectfully the HPRF thing makes no sense. And is provided with no actual proof. And there is mounting evidence to the contrary.

I mean the other half of this, is doctrinally, the soviets were having GCI run encounters so you didn't need SPO if GCI could call a missile launch for you which AFAIK is still very much a thing today. But we have neither some AI GCI to do this for us, and lazur isn't implemented yet either. But keeping it to the SPO, it was one part of a series of systems. And the other part of it is that aside from the mig29/su-27 it seems to have generally worked well on other jets with radars of their own, albeit lower PRF ones in the case of the 23MLD or in the case of the SU-24's ground attack orion that likely worked at MPRF at least, and AFAIK there aren't any comments about the SPO not working with that.

Yeah honestly a tic-box solution of pick your own version to this seems to be the best answer given how contentious and unclear the data is.

Well, except some of the accounts of the warnings working while they were running the radar are in fact from Serbian pilots that survived to tell the tale. Supposedly there is an actual GCI recording or transcript of this somewhere. Honestly I look at this from an occams razor approach. 1. How likely is it the soviets designed a system that purposefully would be useless with the radar on (given that it worked fine on many other jets)... Pretty low/non existant IMO. 2. How difficult is it to design a blanker circuit that works on these freqs/prfs. Not really that hard on a basic electronics level to do this with 60's/70s circuits, and we have evidence from repair manuals of how out of synch things were fixed. (so its unlikely a design fault, and we have evidence it was supposed to get blanked). 3. How reliable was the circuit for the blanker... (apparently not very reliable according to several sources) 4. The mig29 was in service for a short time before the fall of the soviet union. Meaning, it would have early "teething" problems with various equipment likely breaking pretty often (this is a near universal truth with new jets). So, limited spare parts, limited or poorly trained technicians. After the fall of the SU, most client nations certainly ran out of parts/trained techs to work on them in the 90's. 5. In the 90's or early 2000s, where I assume most of the various SME's were flying the 9.12, aside from the Serbia war, it was peactime. So chances that anyone cared about the RWR being broken or partly inop was probably pretty low. And we have at least one account of it actually working during that war, presumably because someone hoarded enough spare parts to get at least a few RWRs operational, for however briefly they would work (again, this seems very plausible IMO). So the simplest explanation for this (occams razor). is that simply most mig29 pilots flew with a broken or partly working or out of synch RWR most of the time. So they are "correct", but they are also likely "wrong" that the system didn't work as designed, because its unlikely to have been designed to "not work", there is no good technical explanation I've heard thus far as to why "it doesn't work". And therefore the simplest explanation is that it was simply broken most of the time on peacetime jets because it doesn't really matter during peacetime. And if the blanker circuit has an MTBF of 10 hours or whatever its gonna be real expensive to keep it running. Thanks for the clarification. thats interesting. Given the mig29 radar is also weaker in terms of peak power it might be even lower in the 29. But so this document is saying it will give spurious readings, not "it will show nothing". Also from a processing standpoint if you know your own radars operating frequency, its probably pretty easy to ignore that strong signal at the known operating frequency of the radar. But maybe not if these docs are right.

Yeah, the problem is that thats not how its modeled in the 29 currently. It just doesn't work at all. And the key word in that translation is "may" show incorrect information. Which is very different than it does show that all the time. The most likely cause of the that is blanker going out of synch with the radar as has been discussed previously and this would cause strong spurious signals. But if its working correctly it would not, hence the word "may". This is also a Su-27 doc IIRC. So much stronger peak emissions than the N019, but it probably wouldn't matter too much.

Well, ITAR probably doesn't apply to documents from soviet times as its a US/NATO thing. Plus almost all of these are sitting in a library somewhere. But yeah probably run it by the mods if you aren't sure.

Yeah fair enough, it obviously had a blanking circuit which also blanked other things which worked fine. I.e. radios/IFF etc.

Explain to the us why the "HPRF waveform" would matter at all. All its doing is turning OFF while this is being transmitted ever 3 microseconds. Like the whole HPRF thing might be an issue for it to "process" when its received from an enemy radar. But there is 0 processing going on with the blanker. Again, a on/off switching rate of 3 microseconds is not a big deal, thats in the kHz range, while most electronics of the era had bo issues running in the megahertz range. That's why it keeps "looping" back to this because this answer from ED makes no sense. And we have evidence from other sources that indicate that it did work, if not always gracefully if it wasn't maintained.