Americans are very strong in the EW regime. Do you have doubts?
Never underestimate your opponent, particularly USA.
Just look at what happened to Russia in Ukraine. Russians would have swallowed Ukraine whole but American support and supply of technologies made it possible for Ukrainians to thrash Russian forces. Russians will be embarrassed further in coming days.
ASSUME that this story is true. What we have is an ideal correlational experiment or study. A correlational experiment is one where the experimenter have no control over one or more variables.
The experimenter is China and the variables are:
- Radar return
- ADS-B info
China can control radar return by turning on/off the radar, varies its transmission characteristics, or move positions. But China have no control over ADS-B info which is under absolute control by the airplane. Then allegedly come radar interference by the US military, somehow somewhere. Assume that the interference is even just %50 effective, now China can use ADS-B info as a correlative factor. The ADS-B info is a constant: one burst per sec. But the radar return is erratic. The ADS-B info tells China that the plane have a spatial translation once per sec, but the radar return is saying once per several secs or even longer. Under actual combat conditions, there would be no cooperation from the target and the erratic radar return would not be enough to respond, but if China chose to respond with an intercept, it would require visual ID of the target which would mean greater risks for the interceptors.
As for the US military as also an experimenter, aside from the two above variables, they have a potential third: Chinese radar behaviors. If they monitored a change in transmissions of any kind such as freq hopping or sweep intensity from a narrower beam, they know their efforts were successful. Ultimately, they could have called the Pelosi's plane and said there was a danger so turn off your ADS-B transmission but, assuming this story is true, there is no need because as long as the plane continues to provide that correlative data, their experiment is successful.
Here is an excellent layman level open source on radar antenna designs and behaviors...
Introduction to Antenna Antenna is an electrical device which converts electric power into radio waves, and vice versa, antenna are used not only on radar but also on jammers, RWR and communicat…
basicsaboutaerodynamicsandavionics.wordpress.com
See section 'Radar Search/Scan Pattern'. When you switch antenna, people
WILL know what you are looking for and
WHY based solely on transmission characteristics that they received.
Do I, personally, care if this story is true? No. Because I seen enough 'dirty' tactics from the SIGINT guys when i was active duty. SIGINT flights are provocative, even if the flight is completely passive and all the flight does is scoop up EM data from anywhere. The Soviets never liked it then and neither does China now. From what SIGINT collected and analyzed came EW tactics disseminated. So people should not think that our EW guys just simply turn on/off their gear.