I understand how you’d detect lasing but not radar lock, especially at the distances and intensities involved (like I’m familiar with how an NMR machine works but I cannot correlate it with RWR).
MAWS also make sense – you’re scanning with radar or laser or IR and use doppler effects to notice something is moving towards you.
In: Engineering
RWR is basically a radar receiver. The lock is (or can be) a tighter lock beam than normal radar. Also pulses coming from an active missle are a different strength, possibly a different frequency, and after firing from an aircraft or SAM will be blue-shifted toward the receiver.
A RWR is a person in a dark area, seeing a crowd of people searching for him with flashlights with various luminosity and distance. A RWR can see that a lock is detected by seeing one of those lights become a lot brighter and flickering rapidly in their direction.
Radars is a bit closer to lasers than you might think, they aren’t just like a beacon, they do aim in a beam. You can think of radars as somewhat narrow beam flashlights. When the radar is in search mode, it’s being swept across the radar’s full FOV.
During this a RWR would notice it might be lit up for only a fraction of a second, and at intervals.
On the other hand, when a radar actually locks onto a target, that flashlight is pointed directly at the target and is kept pointing at it. The RWR would notice that it is being lit up continuously instead of just being for a short period of time at intervals.
Another way is that a radar might use different frequency bands (with certain systems outright just having different radars for search vs tracking) for search and tracking, and would detect the frequency change.
A RWR detects how often you’re being exposed to radar useful for targeting (mostly x-band).
If you are being ‘lit up’ with the radar beam once every 3 seconds, you’re likely in the area of a search radar. You might be tracked, but they are sweeping the radar beam over a large area of the sky to check a big area.
If you are being ‘lit up’ 10 times a second, someone is directing a beam narrowly at your area and is defiantly seeing you, and measuring your position and speed with high accuracy, something they’d do if they wanted to hit you with a weapon.
The radars on fighter jets work in two ways.
One is the familiar one used for detection and awareness, where a ping is sent in a general direction and reflections received.
But then there’s a targeting mode, where it’s actually closer to a laser than the traditional radar mode. A tight, powerful beam is sent at the target to get a strong signal back, from that singular target. A Target Lock.
The second one is what the RWR detects, because it’s very distinct from just the general EM background and other radar noise.
Imagine a search light rotating in a large open stadium. You are on the run inside this stadium. How would you know if they have found you?
It’s when the search light stops rotating and points directly at you, right?
We look for the same thing in radar. If it’s just searching, the targeting would just sweap around. If it’s found you, it would be directly on you with radar waves hitting you at very high frequency.
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