WelshZeCorgi Posted July 6, 2020 Posted July 6, 2020 On the TID, contacts within 2,000 - 3,000 ft of each other show up as a single contact. Occasionally the AWG will track the second contact on the TID and will pop-up momentarily or (rarely) permanently. Is this possibly a bug? Because I'm a little confused as to why such a powerful radar has trouble disserning contacts that far away from each other and what pilots and RIOs should do when you know that the single contact on the TID are actually two contacts.
near_blind Posted July 6, 2020 Posted July 6, 2020 Is this possibly a bug? Because I'm a little confused as to why such a powerful radar has trouble disserning contacts that far away from each other and what pilots and RIOs should do when you know that the single contact on the TID are actually two contacts. It's more of a feature of how HB modelled the radar than a bug. Power helps you see further and overpower certain kinds of jamming, it won't help you see any clearer. That's a matter of how the radar's beam and its signals processing, and here it's important to remember that the AWG-9 is built upon 1960s computational technology; there's only some much you can wring out of it. Even then, all radars will have greater difficulty discerning individual aircraft flying closely together at longer ranges, and depending on the geometry breaking them out might not be possible. As for what do you do? It's highly situational. Generally when an adversary is flying like that, they're attempting to exploit your timeline to get someone outside of your radar's scan zone for an unobserved attack. Say there are four MiG-28s flying at you in close formation. You go STT to lock up the one radar contact, and the other aircraft know you've narrowed your focus to one target, so they split in different directions hoping you won't be able to see them, or see where all of them went. As you shoot on the guy you have locked, one or more sneak around you and hit you with heat seekers. They don't necessarily need to wait for you to go STT, they just need to have an understanding of when you are likely to start sorting targets before engaging, which is usually a couple of miles more than the max range of your missiles. The way you solve this is to fly with one or more friends, coordinate what areas of the sky you are scanning so that between your flight, you are covering as much of the area in front of you with your radar as practical and understanding that if one enemy fighter ballsy enough to come after two or four of you, he's probably either foolhardy or planning something sneaky. In either case be prepared for anything. If you don't fly with others, leave. You're as fast or faster than anything in the game, and have plenty of gas. Finally, you have Phoenixes, they don't. The post hole is prefaced on the assumption that the unobserved aggressor can cover the distance to the target before the target can finish the engagement and start rebuilding situational awareness. That proposition is a lot more iffy if you can start raining down missiles from 60 miles. Best case, you get multiple kills with one missile shot. Worst case, you disrupt their formation and gain a better understanding of what's facing you.
Noctrach Posted July 7, 2020 Posted July 7, 2020 (edited) If you delve in deeper you will also notice that different radar modes have different detection ranges and range resolutions. Where TWS will have great difficulty separating close targets, RWS will do this much further out, surpassed again by PD-SEARCH. You will also need to combine your DDD with your TID results to get the full picture. As near_blind says, you're looking at late 60s computational power here. Separating and filtering the DDD information into separate tracks with closure vectors is a lot of processing. Your single track on the TID might correlate to a double return on the DDD. That same DDD result will show two hits on the TID in RWS. The resolution is still there, but how you use your available processing power decides the TID result. The core message here is: Don't see the TID (or front seat repeater) as your radar picture. The reason there's a RIO in the back is that you need ALL displays for the full picture. Edited July 7, 2020 by Noctrach
draconus Posted July 8, 2020 Posted July 8, 2020 https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?p=4190373#post4190373 Depending on range the separation of even 2000ft can pose a problem for the radar. I don't remember the exact resolution in degrees. Win10 i7-10700KF 32GB RTX4070S Quest 3 T16000M VPC CDT-VMAX TFRP FC3 F-14A/B F-15E CA SC NTTR PG Syria
Naquaii Posted July 8, 2020 Posted July 8, 2020 As said this isn't a bug, this is modelled as detailed in our documentation and should be as is. The best range resolution can be had in the pulse search mode but with all the limitations of that mode. In RWS and TWS the range resolution is limited by the FM-ranging used. And within those range resolution limits the AWG-9 won't be able to tell the targets apart. Newer radars have various techniques to get around this problem but the issue still exists to a lesser degree.
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