White Paper: Changing EW Environment Requires Even Higher RF Power

By Joe Hajduk, dB Control

The theme of AOC's 47th Annual International Symposium and Convention is "Electronic Warfare in a Changing Environment." One aspect of the EW environment that's changing rapidly is the increased sophistication and persistence of threat radars. Today's threat radar detection systems must rapidly discriminate between real targets and those created by digital RF memories (DRFMs). A DRFM captures signals, digitizes them, reconverts them to their analog origin, and then rebroadcasts them, usually after modifying the signal based on a library of known emitters. The rebroadcast signal can be altered to change the target's radar cross-section, range, speed, angle of arrival, and direction. It can also create false targets behind the target (reactive jamming) and ahead of it (predictive jamming) to trick radar detection systems into mislocating or misidentifying the target.