What makes people just fall off the radar ?

I'm setting my scanzone exactly so that the enemy falls right in the middle .

Just when i'm in good range to fire, they disappear . Then 2 seconds later , they re-appear, but then i can't lock them for some reason ?

Then i manage to lock for a split second and they disappear again.

What is this ?

Doppler Notch.

Got a track file??... or that^^

Yeah just watched the track file.

First i lost was a helicopter. Not so strange cause it seems they're almost impossible to lock on sometimes . He was probably moving very slow and low or something.

Second one just freefalled straight down from 20.000 to 5.000 feet as fast as he could.

No wonder i lost him off the radar i guess .

Third one went behind a mountain .

He was chasing my team mate, and as soon as i lost him off my radar, my gut was telling me to turn the other way full burners cause he was very close , and had no radar on .

Just as i want to turn away, i tell myself "no, be more aggresive!" , so what do i do ? I see a new target, and tell myself "the other guy is probably dead" .

And while i'm TWS'sing my new target, i get his feeling that i'm gonna die any second cause of that dude that i told myself was probably dead.

Bam ET hit me from the side :D

This is very cool though, i will explain why :

1) The TAC-tracks are beginning to look more and more as to what they looked in my head when i was flying.

It's no longer a complete mystery , i feel like i'm getting a better sense of distances and altitudes by going off radar.

2) I knew almost to the second when i was going to die from that mountain dwelling SU-27 with his ET's .

I could just feel it coming ... "any second now..." bam . It was no surprise .

So that's good to i guess. It's was a good flight in terms of learning.

And i even got a pretty sweet kill myself on a mig-29s that had no idea what hit him untill it was too late.

Also nice kil "goah" or something :) I should have ran when i got that uncomfortable feeling :D

p.s: What's a "doppler_notch" ?

Can you explain it further ? The picture does not do it for me, does the doppler have trouble trackign targets that are moving sideways from it ? (from left to right?)

p.s: What's a "doppler_notch" ?

 

When a transmitted pulse (from the radar) hits a target aircraft and is reflected back to the radar, then if the aircraft is flying toward/away from the radar, there will be a slight change in the frequency of the pulse caused by the doppler effect. Measurement of this will give a rough idea of the speed of the "target".

Most modern radars use a filter to get rid of spurious clutter returns by ditching any pulses from "targets" that exhibit too slow a doppler speed, ie. it assumes these can't really be an aircraft (might be birds, rain, the ground, waves at sea, etc.) If you draw a graph of speed against rejection/acceptance, it kinda looks like a straight line with a notch cut in it, hence the term doppler notch:-

--------\____/--------

A bandit can exploit this doppler rejection by turning to fly a course at 90 degrees to the radar that makes his speed toward/away from the radar seem too slow to be a genuine target.

ah i see ...

Ok thank you

would an enemy going 80 degrees off have a chance to go off radar as well? If so what would you estimate the top speed of this plane before it is recognized by radar.