picking up another planes active radar?

[fitness88]

Does a plane have to be inside your radar's cone to be able to pick up your active radar emissions?

 

Thank you.

[SFAL]

Yes.

 

Su27 and the F15 is quite good with that. The Mig29 is a lot of work to find targets... smaler radar.

[EtherealN]

Ingame, I believe yes.

 

In reality, shouldn't be, but depends on the radar set; it should be feasible (or example) to detect sidelobe emissions.

 

SFAL; I don't believe he was talking about finding other targets. He seems to be asking if your own radar emissions will only be detected by other aircraft's RWR equipment if they are within your scan cone. (And note that the emissions will be detected even outside the range where you yourself will detect targets, due to only having "one pass" through the inverse square law of the attenuation of electromagnetic radiation.) In reality however, there are all sorts of other "fun" things that happen, such as sidelobe emissions etcetera, that might belie this. I do however not believe that this is modeled in DCS World (yet).

 

EDIT:

 

A theoretical directional emitter (such as, for example, a radar set) radiation pattern:

 

 

Edited October 10, 2013 by EtherealN

[VincentLaw]

Couldn't they put a Faraday cage (or an aluminum foil hat) around the back and sides of the radar to block the undesired emission lobes? Maybe that would interfere with the main lobe though. A little reading on the topic reveals that an "ungrounded" metal surface would reflect some of the radiation back at the emitter (which is obviously undesired), but maybe you could ground the shield to the frame of the aircraft. Would that just turn the frame into another emitter?

Edited October 10, 2013 by VincentLaw

[fitness88]

Ingame, I believe yes.

 

In reality, shouldn't be, but depends on the radar set; it should be feasible (or example) to detect sidelobe emissions.

 

SFAL; I don't believe he was talking about finding other targets. He seems to be asking if your own radar emissions will only be detected by other aircraft's RWR equipment if they are within your scan cone. (And note that the emissions will be detected even outside the range where you yourself will detect targets, due to only having "one pass" through the inverse square law of the attenuation of electromagnetic radiation.) In reality however, there are all sorts of other "fun" things that happen, such as sidelobe emissions etcetera, that might belie this. I do however not believe that this is modeled in DCS World (yet).

 

 

Thank you all for your feedback.

EtherealN, as highlighted in red above, you are correct in understanding my question.

I ask this question because I don't like flying CAP with my active radar blindly on. Especially since RWR can pick up a radar signal much further away than can the emitting plane get the return.

I do go with my EOS on instead, the problem is that the bug of not being able to raise or lower the scan has rendered it far less effective.

[SFAL]

Looks like i did misunderstood the question.

 

What you can try is to periodacly turn radar on.. or use elavation so the search settings remain the same...

 

EOS at this time is VERY limited