"Fred Bloggs" wrote in message
...

Frequency agile Ku band transmission? What kind of tube did they use for
that?

Klystrons and Magnetrons can be mechanically tuned over a limited range.
Making the receivers track the transmitters is a bigger problem.

Wondering why the Ku band could not just take a handoff and do the
tracking on its own, must not have been a stable track.

The jamming equipment I worked against was pretty limited - it seemed to
only jam one band at a time. After all, it was in a fighter/bomber (F4) not
a B-52.

As long as my HIPIR didn't try to obtain ranging information, the jammer
usualy just enhanced my radar's target tracking accuracy. Seriously, a
target could be kinda marginal for tracking due to extreme range, but when
he turned on his jammer the tracking often tightened right up. His counter
for that was to try to AM his signal close to the rotational speed of the
rotating scanner, but as a rule that was not very effective. It is possible
that his jammer was optimized for a scanner that ran faster or slower.

Since jamming usually *enhanced* HIPIR tracking, making the ROR track for
itself would like going backwards.

Furthermore, once you had even a guess at the target's range, a homing
missle had a good chance of getting to the target. Range info was most
important for knowing when the target was in range. Range did go into the
lead angle calculations for optimizing the intercept, but it was a smaller
part of the solution.

What kind of cheap ill-begotten antenna gets you less angular resolution
at Ku band than X-band?

A really small one, or one with a rough surface, but that wasn't the
problem.

Ku band is appreciably more sensitive to problems with rain and snow, not
that X band isn't also affected by them. But weather is less of a problem
in the X band.

Look at how satellite TV suffers with heavy weather.