Listen-via-HARM
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A year or two ago I read “First In, Last Out: Stories by the Wild Weasels” and I will quote a few sentences for you, buckle up.
Billy Sparks flew an F-105F and this is what he said:“Carlo [Lombardo, EWO] was doing his standard bit of trying to figure out the Radar Order of Battle for the day. He would start while we were still in Northern Laos and used every piece of gear in the aircraft. He would have me turn up the Audio on the Shrike Missile and slowly move the nose around to see what he could hear in that spectrum. He would have the Shrike audio turned back down and would use the ER-142 in all of its modes, creating all sorts of strange squeaks and squawks. He’d diddle with the APR35/36 by pressing the Press-To-Test buttons. That defeated the logic in the system and allowed him to get a raw feed from each band. All of these strange noises made little sense to me; however, they made a bunch of sense to Carlo.
He was especially interested in the fairly high pitched EEK-EEK made by height-finder radars and the much lower pitched, more slowly spaced UNKs from the BARLOCK (GCI) radars.”Is it possible with the HARM? Or, could it be implemented in BMS?
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I have no idea if the HARM does that, but IMO, with a HTS pod, you dont need to
All the info is processed for you, no need to listen to this audio feedback, a F-16 is not a submarine
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Unfortunately , no it is not. Those days were the glory of the wild weaseling. Nowadays the SEAD is completely digital and the pilot/EWO using the HARM/HTS/ALQ-99 does not have access to that anymore. Actually the HTS is able to do at maximum 60-70% of what the old F-4G with its WASP/HAWC could do in the 80s/90s. A pilot in a single seater does not have the time to go heads down….it is just not enough time to fly and play with the knobs.
And Wild Weaseliing in Falcon4 is implemented very superficial. Radars do not have frequencies, bands, PRF etc. Even jamming assets like th EF-111 and the EA-6B are just a hack fo the old times of SP3.
I remember though a long time using Harpoon that some guy develop a mod where you could operate the console of a EWO in a ELINT platform (RC-135?)…you could see a spectrum analyzer with 5 lines covering different spectral regions, and then you could display the main bands, side bands, effect of PRF, chirped pulses…
It would be great though to have a simulation of two-seater WW like the F-4G, Tornado ECR, F-105G, EF-18G…I would be the first one flying it. But this is not priority for BMS deve team, I think.
Cheers
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I think the subjects goes way deeper than the “secret” clarification to be realistically implemented in a public pc software…
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EW is no magic……how the physics/electronics work is well known and is published in dozens of books.
The issue for a “realistical” simulation is to know the parameters of real systems. -
And you I’ll never know this kind of things ;).
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I do listen to the raw (pun!) RWR audio. You get get some extra perception this way.
HARM seekers do network with the HTS to enhance the sensor coverage of the HTS alone.
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@Thuc- very good post.
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I think the subjects goes way deeper than the “secret” clarification to be realistically implemented in a public pc software…
“Secret” would be the highest classification, however elements of intel (how data was gathered) may exceed the “secret” level.
