In Reply Batman.
Personally i think Rafale is the best. Its a true multi role fighter. Its spectra suite is designed to avoid detection whilst carrying out EW operations.
Its design gives low RCS and it will have a very powerful AESA radar soon and the new MBDA BVR missle Meteore.
I personally hope IAF gives the nod to Rafale.. Would be very smart choice.
I think THE F16/F18 once great state of the art fighters have been surpassed by the Typhoon & Rafale.
Here is what France claim about the SPECTRA...
Thales Spectra - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Thales Group and Dassault Aviation have mentioned stealthy jamming modes for the SPECTRA system, to reduce the aircraft's apparent radar signature. It is not known exactly how these work or even if the capability is fully operational, but it may employ active cancellation technology, such as has been tested by Thales and MBDA. Active cancellation is supposed to work by sampling and analysing incoming radar and feeding it back to the hostile emitter out of phase thus cancelling out the returning radar echo.
In theory and application, the technique
DOES work. However, for whatever reasons I do not know, France is omitting the ECCM technique in the sales brochure.
Here are some more radar principles...
The vast majority of the world's radar system, ground and air, are of the pulsed mode of operation. A pulse is essentially an on/off switch mode of transmission. Each pulse will have a time duration of when it was created and when its energy was cut off. Pulses give us target resolutions, the base information are range and speed. If one pulse produce an echo at .01 sec and the next pulse produced an echo at .02 sec we know the target is moving. Then we have other factors such as Doppler and because an aircraft is a complex object, features on the target will produce other forms of returns and that give us target aspect angle but these subjects will overwhelm the current topic so I will not get into them for now.
Look through this source for basic information on radar pulses...
PULSE-REPETITION FREQUENCY (prf)
If there are ten pulses and stop, that is a 'pulse train'. If there are ten more pulses and stop, that is another pulse train. And so on...
Between pulses are gaps, remember that a pulse is essentially an on/off switch of energy, and the gaps create what is called 'pulse repitition frequency' (PRF). The above link has an illustration of a PRF, for simplicity's sake they call it 'rest time', but that is the PRF.
What the SPECTRA ECM suite does is analyze a series of incoming pulses and create an out-of-phase transmission to (hopefully) cancel out, or rather mask any echoes coming off the aircraft's body. The suite
DOES NOT control those echoes. The suite is actually a transmitter in itself, pretty much like an ECM pod but with slightly more sophistication in transmission. If the incoming pulse train consists of, for example, 1000 pulses, based on my experience, the suite should be sophisticate enough to need less than ten pulses, may be 15 at the most, to form a reasonably accurate analysis of the hostile radar's transmission characteristics and to create an ECM response.
To take another gratuitous jab at Russia and China, the SPECTRA may be good enough against Russian and Chinese avionics junk.
With US radars, the ECCM technique is called PRF jittering...Example...
Surveillance Radar RTS-6400|Multi-spectral operation
ECCM Features
* Frequency agility
* Random PRF stagger
* PRF jitter
* Programmable digital pulse compression
* Low antenna sidelobes
* Large instantaneous dynamic range
* Track-on-jam
* Adaptive tracking filters
* Scenario-adaptive doppler processing
* Multi-spectral operation
Remember the example of a pulse train above -- If there are ten pulses and stop, that is a 'pulse train'. If there are ten more pulses and stop, that is another pulse train. And so on...
What if the transmitter change the pulse repition frequency (PRF) on the second pulse train? And on the third? And on the fourth? And so on...? That is called PRF jittering and it is
VERY effective against ECM suites using pulse freq analysis to create out-of-phase countermeasure transmissions. That ECM suite must constantly reset its analysis because successive pulse trains, with different PRF, will have slightly different characteristics.
To make the explanation slightly simpler...Say there are ten pulses sent at the target. The target will use two pulses to analyze the hostile radar characteristics. But that mean the hostile radar now has two echoes from those first two pulses to analyze the target before the other eight pulses are garbage due to ECM.
If the next ten pulses are
EXACTLY the same as the first pulse train, then the target have just disappeared from the scope. But if the next pulse train have slightly different characteristics, such as a higher or lower PRF through PRF jittering, then we are back to point A where the target need two pulses to analyze literally a new transmission and the hostile radar have two genuine echoes that came off the target. So do the math...Two echoes out of ten pulses in a pulse train and there are one thousand pulse trains. That is good enough for a target track and perhaps even a missile solution.
What if we change the frequency on the next pulse train...And the next...And the next? Now this electronic battle between the combatants have gotten much more complex because each pulse train have more diversity due to different frequencies and PRF. Each pulse train will give the hostile radar at least two echoes of the target before the successive eight became garbage.
Sophisticated avionics will have PRF jittering
INSIDE the pulse train itself, not merely from pulse train to pulse train. It will remember the exact characteristics of each transmission and compare those characteristics against whatever returned from the target. An addition is to change the frequency from pulse to pulse as well as changing the PRF inside a pulse train. What I said here is only a scratch on the surface of a very complex topic. Whether US radars have pulse frequency jittering as well as PRF jittering or not -- I will not say. The readers can try to find any publicly available information and form their own conclusions. But I do not take jabs at Russian and Chinese junks from out of nothing.