I meant whatever the signal the plane uses to guide amraams, a big cone infront of antenna( Larger than the main beamwidth itself)
Matches in top tier. Once amraams go active, anything inside the cone will get a rwr warning. Not only the plane thats getting targeted will get the warning.
Why would the seeker scan around once it knows the target? Lock it and don’t lose it. On terminal guidance you need constant information for the guidance computer for any corrections. You’d increase the chance of losing the target if he chaffs or employs ecm.
16km
Closure rate is high and those ranges may vary. On the phoenix if the f14 RIO selects target size - small, its 6NM~ 11km.
To know its a ARH missile you could identify it with the higher than usual PRF required due to the high closure rates.
As for the recording of the RWR, that would mostly fall to SIGINT, not the fighter itself. Recording all frequency ranges would take alot of memory. One giga is 1,000,000,000 Hz. Even if you separate into 10kHz blocks you’d have 100,000 values to store in the memory. And thats just for an instant. How many times do you do it? Every 50 ms( Do mind that radars to measure range use frequency modulation and they change rates at values like every 8.6 ms so you might miss them for proper sigint)? 20 per second. 2,000,000 values every second. Now what about every 25 ms? 4 million. Lets say you want to cover 4GHz. 16 million values. It will eat memory. Not telling you its not possible, but look at limitations of the era(memory sizes). It’s easy to say record, look later but you gotta do the recording part first.
Also, RF space is congested. You gotta filter ALOOOOOOT. And waveforms aren’t simple long continuous waves you can say, hey I see xy frequency in the spectrum and it must be from something. You have them using pulses( could be short as 1.5 micro seconds) followed by 1.5μs to 2500μs of nothingness where the radar just listens for its signal. The frequency of the pulse trains gradually increase/decrease frequency then after couple milliseconds increase/decrease at a higher or lower rate. Then you could have the single pulse change frequency( pulse compression). Then you could see be seeing 2 signals from 2 different contacts arriving because they have 2 different frequencies but no, in reality is just 1 plane doing 1s and 0s with those 2 frequencies.
Hell how you they classify unknown? How constant must it be? For example the apg 65 occasionally throws a burst for accurate ranging purpuses, that burst will have length, pulses a width, a PRF different than the standard waveform. Assuming its long enough to appear, would the receiving RWR mark it as a unknown or what?
Rather just leave that job to sigint and capabilities are unknown.
