Russian PESA and AESA Radars

GarryB wrote:Nice article on AESA radars for drones.

For those wanting to make things easier about 3/4ths down the first page there is a link saying pdf (eng). If you left click on that it opens a new page with a pdf window showing the document in english. At the top right of the pdf window there is a button that looks like >> .

If you click on that a drop down menu appears. If you choose save you can save a copy of the pdf in english on your computer to read at your leisure.

"No less significant are the design features and manufacturing accuracy of the antenna system and its elements. It is known that with a random distribution of phase errors in the phased array aperture"

Here we can see the usefulness of having decades of experience manufacturing phased arrays. I don't have the article now but there was a publication that mentionned that the N036's power aperture product jumped by three fold during the early development period without even a change in the element base. (Thus the fact that the final version is way way ahead of that as well). If Irbis then could do 400 km vs a 3 Sqm in TWS the N036 would very probably do it vs either a much smaller target or in a wider scanned zone.

Well there were two things that really surprised the west regarding the original MiG-31 PESA radar compared to the F-14 radar that they often compared it with... the first was the lack of processing power used with the radar, which limited its range, but that the mirror method of scanning gave it an enormous volume of coverage, and the speed of the electronic scanning meant that unlike the F-14s radar it could track targets within its entire field of regard and illuminate them sufficient to engage the targets with SARH missiles.

The F-14 could engage 6 targets at once at different speeds and directions, but during tests the vertical separation between the targets was less than about 700m because of the radar limitations.

At the end of the day many fighters wont even turn on their radar during an engagement and will receive target data from other platforms so the radar they have is not critical.

Having said that a modern AESA radar is an excellent sensor able to detect and track a huge range of targets from ground level upwards and a datalink to share that information with other platforms on the battlefield makes such real time up to date information valuable.

A few hundred MiG-35s over the battlefield detecting targets and threats would massively add to information about then enemy forces and their distribution... and unlike having hundreds of drones these AESA radars will be high res and offer very detailed information and of course the MiGs will also be carrying IRST and IIR sensors that can provide further information that can also be shared... and also, unlike a drone can carry air to air and air to ground weapons.

It is not enough to have lots of platforms detecting enemy targets, being able to engage a large portion of those targets at one time means you can inflict a serious shock on the enemy when you start shredding their forces on the ground and in the air.