You don’t need beam splitting for that, and from what I heard beam splitting is not always that desirable or doable IRL anyways (since it splits your radar’s power output, reducing its range against a target of a given RCS).
To the best of my understanding the way this works is that because electronic beam steering (both PESA and AESA) allows you to steer and move the beam to an arbitrary position very rapidly (unlike a mechanical antenna which takes time to move due to its mass), you can essentially “pause” your regular scan pattern briefly, move the beam outside the scan volume to update a track, and then return and resume your scan pattern.
Of course on a mechanical radar it doesn’t work as good and for as many tracks, since it takes more time to take the mechanical antenna outside of the scan pattern and then return it again, compared to an AESA or PESA which can steer the beam electronically, very rapidly.
Assuming that a 1:1 ratio between T/R modules & antenna, and a module count greater than one defines the boundary between an AESA and PESA radar, fixed zoning (grouping) of modules together would allow for multiple (PESA) “beams” to be formed. Though of course it would less flexible then true AESA solutions.
Something else to take into account is that commanding the radar to perform multiple tasks simultaneously may not always be possible (e.g. long range priority track + TWS etc.) even with an AESA, as improper division of tasks or due to Reduced effective Duty cycle / the reduced radiated power’s impact on maximum range detection range may cause dropped targets, or insufficient returns to be generated.
This magazine by Dassault and partners clarifies that this is one of the inherent advantages of the electronically scanned radars over mechanical radars:
I see.
Do you happen to have a picture of an F2 using it ? (Since it’s easier to differentiate it compared to an F3 to the others).
Personally all of the F2 I see on google image don’t feature this antenna
That magazine could be misconstrued by devs or tech mods to be talking about the AESA specifically. I got something better. A textbook authored by engineers who worked on the RBE2 PESA radar discussing the benefits of PESA. Book was published before the existence of the AESA variant.
To be more concise, you would have operational level equipment and Training equipment.
For the majority of air forces, your training equipment is completely separate to your operational equipment with minimal cross over. We typically don’t go swapping out parts at a whim because the aircraft may need recertification from a regulatory standpoint depending on the part you are changing.
Maybe I’m not comprehending this, but looking at the graphs, the induced drag seems to be increased overall, and yet the data miners state that the induced drag is actually reduced. What did I miss ?
