On Tue, 21 Aug 2007 18:22:24 -0400, Scott Dorsey wrote:
Rich Grise wrote:

No, the Wild Weasels were recce. The EWO (Electronic Warfare Officer),
ususally the GIB (Guy In Back), had a spectrum-analyzer display, to
sniff out the jammers (and maybe even comm.). I don't know exactly what
they did with the info, other than evasive maneuvers, but it gave a pretty
good idea of the radar environment they were flying into.

At the time, the Bad Guys only had a limited number of standard radar
platforms. So with a spiral antenna and a spectrum analyzer, you could
pretty quickly tell what was in the neighborhood from the emission
frequency and the rough envelope. And with a directional antenna and a
little hunting around, you could pretty quickly localize the direction of
the source. So with a pretty limited toolkit, you could tell what the
bad guys were (ie. targetting radar, sky search, airborne radar) and where
they were. Likewise you could very easily tell a legitimate radar system
from a jammer from the spectrum, and the jamming platforms were fairly
standardized.

Doing this while being shot at is left as an exercise to the student and
may not be as easy as identifing spectral envelopes in an air-conditioned
laboratory.


One of the systems I worked on was the APR-9, "Radar Homing and Warning
Receiver". It had four spiral antennas, one on each corner of the airplane,
and it gave an indication like a PPI of which direction the radar was
coming from, excpet the longer the strobe, the closer/more powerful.

Because of the way the SAM radar worked, when the two beams are in sync,
you know they've locked onto you. It lights up a light in the cockpit,
labeled "AS" for "Acquisition Sector". Needless to say, it came to be
referred to as the "Aw ****" light. ;-)

Cheers!
Rich