L17 Pre-flight

L17 Pre-flight#

Block 2: RF Electronic Warfare — Lesson 17: Electromagnetic Attack Work this before L17. Pre-flights are never collected — in class, anyone may be cold-called to present any question at the board, and that recitation is the participation grade.

Assumed pre-class reading#

  • L16 wrap-up

  • The Jupyter Book Reading page for L17 — EA vs ES/EP, noise jamming types (spot/barrage/swept-spot), jamming geometry, the J/S ratio, and burn-through.

Quiz questions (5 items, ~5 minutes)#

Q1. (Multiple choice) Electromagnetic Attack (EA) is best described as:

  • [ ] (a) Protecting our own radars and links from jamming

  • [ ] (b) Listening to and locating enemy emitters

  • [ ] (c) Using EM energy to deny, degrade, or disrupt the enemy’s use of the spectrum

  • [ ] (d) Reducing an aircraft’s radar cross section

Q2. (Multiple choice) A noise jammer that rapidly hops a high-power narrow spot across a wide band — trading dwell time for coverage — is:

  • [ ] (a) Barrage jamming

  • [ ] (b) Spot jamming

  • [ ] (c) Swept-spot jamming

  • [ ] (d) Deceptive jamming

Q3. (Multiple choice) For a self-protect jammer, the skin echo falls as \(1/R^4\) while the jammer signal falls as \(1/R^2\). Therefore J/S scales as:

  • [ ] (a) \(1/R^2\) — J/S rises as the target closes

  • [ ] (b) \(R^2\) — J/S falls as the target closes

  • [ ] (c) \(1/R^4\)

  • [ ] (d) Independent of range

Q4. (Multiple choice) Burn-through range is:

  • [ ] (a) The range at which the jammer runs out of power

  • [ ] (b) The range at which J/S has dropped enough that the radar can detect and track the target despite the jamming

  • [ ] (c) The maximum range of the radar with no jamming

  • [ ] (d) The range at which the jammer must switch frequencies

Q5. (Short answer) A self-protect target halves its range to the radar. What happens to J/S (in dB), and why does cutting the target’s RCS push the burn-through range inward?

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