Although not related to what you guys are discussing still as a military professional how would you compare an AMRAAM with the Russian R-77?
You already named the russian sukhoi series as sucky series.
In terms of features, both the American AMRAAM and the Russian R-77 are equal. However, equal features does not mean equal capabilities.
Let us take the fact that both missiles employed monopulse radar as an example...
[3.0] Modern Radar Technology (1)
send multiple pulses with angular offsets at the same time.
In practice, a monopulse system will have four feed horns to track a target along both axes.
In a monopulse system, the four distinct echoes of a target is summed and differenced in separate operations. But that does
NOT mean there are four distinct antennas, only that a single antenna assembly contains four distinct transmitters, to put it simply. The radar computer will then perform the necessary calculations upon those four echoes and create a target profile and that the entire antenna assembly should keep the target inside that dark area created by the four transmitters that overlapped each other.
Here is what the Vympel supposedly is capable of doing...
Vympel R-77 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
If the seeker is jammed, it switches automatically to a passive mode and homes on the source of jamming.
The same claim is made for the American AMRAAM.
To seduce a monopulse system require an active ECM system and for most aircrafts that would require an ECM pod or a dedicated ECM platform like the American EF-111. One method to seduce a monopulse system is to process the four transmit signals, isolate at least one of them, and create
ONE false signal that will, electronically speaking, enlarge that dark area beyond a certain threshold. That will force the antenna to continuously try to reacquire the target based upon ambiguous sums and differences of those four signals.
The problem is that chaff is not jamming but should be recognized as seduction. Jamming is active in the sense that there are powered transmitters that attempts to overwhelm a certain amount of bandwidth. Chaff is not active in the sense that the strips are not self-powered emitters, they 'emit' only when there are signals impacting them. So if there is sufficient chaff to saturate the missile's electronic field-of-view (FoV), for either the American's or the Russian's, then the missile will be homing in on chaff. But then again, once the strips become emitters because of signals impacting them, some have argued that at that point chaff should be considered as active jamming for as long as there are transmissions.
Monopulse systems are highly accurate in terms of target profiling but can be equally highly vulnerable to seduction
IF the ECM platform is aware that it is going up against a monopulse radar.
Moving on...
There are three distinct modes of passive seekings:
1- Antiradiation homing. This is usually against surface radars such as shipborne or missile launchers. Very wideband. Surface radars signals should not be considered to be in same class as wideband noise jamming signals. Surface radars signals have characteristics that clearly distinguish them from noise, such as multiple pulse repetition freqs (prf), freq agility, amplitude agility, and the list goes on...
2- Home on Jam (HoJ). This is what concerns air-air combat. These jamming signals are usually directional, meaning they can be tracked to come from a certain direction. Their signals are noise designed to saturate a certain bandwidth. Responses to chaff reflections falls under HoJ.
3- Radiometric. This mode seeks out innate thermal radiation from a body, contrast that against background radiation, and home in on that contrast. This is the simplest of designs but is also limited to two dimensional targets, like a tank or even a human body contrasting against the trees in the background, although the tank will give the greatest contrast. With millimeter-wave, or millimetric radars, small mammals like rodents have been contrasted by the radar.
Item two (HoJ) is what will distinguish the American AMRAAM and the Russian R-77 in terms of lethality.
Wideband noise is brute force and intends to saturate, but it also is an excellent source of angular direction of those signals and angular calculations are the bread and butter of any monopulse system. Remember, the monopulse radar computer will seek to zero out any angular discrepancies.
Chaff is not two but three dimensional because the target is moving and dispensing chaff at the same time, creating not only a saturated field-of-view but also in depth of that saturation.
So what happens is that the missile initially detect a target with its own radar, the target dispensed chaff, then the missile homes in on the chaff bloom. At this point, there is the 'jammer-to-signal' ratio the missile must recognize. The 'signal' here is the skin return that the missile classified as 'the target'. As this ratio increases in favor of noise, the seeker switches to passive tracking of the noise. We do not know the precise tolerances for both missiles on how each will process this ratio. If the missile switches to passive seek mode too soon after the J-S ratio have just been detected it may ignore valid skin returns from the target.
As the missile travels through the chaff bloom's electronic noise cloud, the J-S ratio should decrease in favor of that skin return
PROVIDED that the target remains within the missile's radar field-of-view (FoV). Aircrafts that dispensed chaff do not remain static and docile. They will violently maneuver and will seek to turn the table on their attackers. We do not know the precise mechanical tolerances for both missiles as far as the sweep angles of their radar antennas. The wider the better but we simply do not know. If the missile switches to passive seek mode when the J-S ratio is too small, it may be susceptible to multiple directions noise jamming. The balance is delicate.
The problem for the R-77 is that the American 'stealth' aircraft series are designed to be problematic for centimetric and millimetric wave radars, which is usally the X-band, whose high freq are vital for any moving target, even police speed radars uses the X-band. Aircrafts with larger antennas have had problems acquiring target locks on the F-22, let alone a missile's far smaller radar antenna.
There are simply too many unknowns as far as technical data goes for both the American AMRAAM and the Russian R-77. Any Russian or Chinese who declare that categorically the R-77 is superior is merely desperate.
Clear as mud?