How do aircraft/fighter jets know that they are being locked on by an anti aircraft system or by another fighter jet?
In: 2036
Radar threat warning system. If you know the enemy’s systems you know which radar signatures belong to which weapon systems. There are radomes/receivers all over the aircraft, wing tips, several on the vertical stabilizer, and underneath which can also tell the pilot where the threat is coming from.
Back in the day (F4/Vietnam) we had elint escorts. When the SAM site locked on, their radar went to a high PRF (pulse recurrence frequency). Our escorts would broadcast a warning on Guard – “Blue bells singing.”
Because they pick up the radar signal (microwaves or short radio) that the AAA system is using to track them. Is like if someone shines a light on you as opposed to just illuminating for a brief moment.
Radar uses radio waves, and radio waves are a lot like
light. If someone shines a flashlight at you, you can see where it’s coming from, right? With the right kind of sensing equipment (kind of like a camera), you can “see” the radio waves used by radar.
When radar systems are scanning for a target, it’s like shining a light around a room looking for a hidden person. When you spot something interesting, you pint the light directly at the target. This is equivalent to what happens when a radar system “locks on” to a target. The radio waves go from flashes to a near continuous beam.
I can answer this very simply. Your eyes work by seeing things with visible light. This light comes from the sun and bounces off objects to your eyes. radar and other options are the same but instead of the sun being the source we make a device put out light rays we can’t see and time their return. That’s radar, and the plane can see it with ‘eyes’ on their body. Suddenly they have a floodlight on them and they can see they are illuminated by something unnatural, alert up.
You’re playing flashlight tag. The person who’s it has two flashlights, blue and white. They can sweep the blue light around to look for people, but they have to hold the white light on a person to tag them.
The lights are radar: blue is search/scan radar, white it targeting/painting radar. The plane has sensors that can detect the “lights”, so when it sees the white light being held on it, it knows someone is trying to tag it (with a missile).
Say a radio transmitter is a light. And that only certain colors of light are good for different things (say, red for finding things, yellow for locking onto things, blue for saying things) Then you have a receiver that is the eye, and is built to only see that color. So you build an eye that can only see yellow, and when it sees yellow it tells you.
As others have said tracking and locking radar operate on different frequencies of radio signal and different frequencies of pulses.
But these days that system of tracking/search and lock radar is rapidly becoming obsolete and more of a Hollywood trope. Electronically phased radar is becoming more common, and tracking and searching can be the same operation
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phased_array
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