Aircraft Radar Question

I have a question regarding Radar. I know that Radar can give Altitude, Speed and Heading. But is there a Radar that can give Aircraft Type? For instance can an intercepting fighter aircraft tell what type of aircraft it will be going up against from its radar signiture?
So if a " insert favorite Fighter here " was on an intercept mission would its Radar be able to tell if it was up against a Mig for instance just based on its Radar signiture?
Thanks in advance.

Current Radar systems use a wavelength and technology that does not lend itself to detail, its used for distance and clarity. For detail, you want to use shorter wavelengths, which give you greater detail of the object the waves are being bounced from, but this still takes a LOT of computer power to make sense of and it doesnt work as well over large distances (shorter wavelengths scatter more).

For a detailed radar system to work, it has to encode more data in the outgoing waves than currently is done. It also needs multiple receiving aerials to differentiate the patterns coming back.

Currently, apart from a very few expensive and experimental systems, radar can only tell you what said. You can make assumptions on the type of aircraft based on its speed, altitude, manoeuverability, and radar return, for example a B-52 will have a larger return than a F-15, but nothing is guaranteed (you could send up an interceptor to find that that B-52 is infact 5 F-15s in close formation).

Thankyou Richard, thats just what i was looking for. I had researched the stuff myself but not bieng fammilier with Radar i was having trouble making head or tail of it. I just needed someone to explain it in laymans terms. Thankyou very much

Hehe..radar..quite interesting..had a whole subject on it...lots of progress yet to be made in that field..

Janus, that avaatar of yours, is it real or fictional?

[edit on 16-1-2005 by Daedalus3]

Looks like the Wildcards from Space: Above and Beyond...

Heh, yeah i always liked that show, espesially the first one with the retired US Marine master sarg, cant remember his name though.

US Marines Drill Instructor R. Lee Ermey, same bloke as the one in Full Metal Jacket. He was actually a Drill Instructor who was brought onset for advisory reasons on Drilling US Marine style, but he performed a demonstration on videotape in which he yelled obscene insults and abuse for fifteen minutes without stopping, repeating himself, or even flinching - despite being continuously pelted with tennis balls and oranges. Director Stanley Kubrick was so impressed that he cast Ermey as Gunnery Sergeant Hartmann.

And did you know that the entire film, Full Metal Jacket, was shot in England (UK)? If you look closely, you can see road markings that are on the wrong side of the road to the US.

Yep that would be him. I didnt know that Full Metal Jacket was filmed in the UK. You learn something new every day.

i think if we do have a radar like that, it would scan the shape of the plane, and look through an onboard database. and if the plane's shape was found in the database, it would tell the pilot that its found a positive match with a mig, or something similar to that. like if the an enemy was scanning our aircraft, if the plane it was scanning had slanted tail wings, it would eliminate something like a tomcat, but a possibility could be a raptor. if you still dont get what im saying, send me a U2U.

You seem be talking about some higly classified radar..because as far as I know Radar cannot didtinguish aircraft "shapes" and angles, just the the whole signature..like the guy above was saying you cannot distinguish a bunch of F-16 in delta formation from a B-52..


Hehe..Yeah I htough as much that it was from Space above and beyond...loved that show..soundtrack was cool ..anybody know where I can get it?..What ever happened to that show I hear it got cancelled..
The last ep. I ever saw was, the oriental guy dying..the black woman and the brunette falling into a planet, and the lead guy re-united with his POW gal...anything after that?..books movies..

can any one make or design and control small radar to discovery asmall fighter ?

Im not sure abd, the reason i posted the question is that with BVR weapons that are used now it would be pretty easy to shoot down a friendly. Im sure that there are FoF systems in place but i always thought it would an advantage to have a Radar that could tell the Aircraft type as well as the FoF system for Aircraft ID.

[edit on 17-1-2005 by Janus]

Originally posted by Daedalus3

Hehe..Yeah I htough as much that it was from Space above and beyond...loved that show..soundtrack was cool ..anybody know where I can get it?..What ever happened to that show I hear it got cancelled..
The last ep. I ever saw was, the oriental guy dying..the black woman and the brunette falling into a planet, and the lead guy re-united with his POW gal...anything after that?..books movies..

It was completely cancelled, and I dont know of any psot series books or anything. It was a pity, it could have been something good.

The new Battlestar Galactica is turning out to be good tho.

BattleStar Galactica is Ok, but it doesnt have that real feel to it like Space Above and Beyond had. There was an episode where Cooper went on a covert Op behind Chig lines as a Sniper that had a very Vietnam feel to it.

Originally posted by Janus
BattleStar Galactica is Ok, but it doesnt have that real feel to it like Space Above and Beyond had. There was an episode where Cooper went on a covert Op behind Chig lines as a Sniper that had a very Vietnam feel to it.

yeah I watched that ep whe nI was 12 years old and it scared the beejeesus outta me!!..I still remember that haunting lady...

You sure no books,fan-fic, movie(s)??
It was an amazing show, the most realistic sci-fi space serial I've ever seen

Janus, the fact that we can't tell what kind of aircraft we're seeing out there based on Radar returns is correct. But more important than knowing what type of aircraft is would be to ensure whose it is; in other words, we don't want to shoot down our own aircraft.

Over the past ten years, the US military services have been working together to develop an integrated battlespace system so that everyone everywhere on the battlefield -- whether in the air, on the sea or the ground -- knows where all their assets are and (by process of elimination) where the Bad Guys are.

Of course, an Army or Marine platoon leader wouldn't get all this information because he doesn't need to know it all, but the folks in the AWACS aircraft have all the assets in the sky right in their computers, and squirt out the relevant data to every aircraft around.

As a matter of fact, an AWACS aircraft can take a radar 'snapshot' of the battle, and send that information discretely to three Apache helicopters, doced so that the display on each aircraft's MFD shows the Bad Guys as they are from that particluar helicopter -- and updated in practically real time.

Needless to say, this requires tremendous processing horsepower and very robust software algorithms, and is one of the reasons that, if you're a software engineer with a clerarance, you can rest assured of getting a contractor's job at around US$100/hr.

IMHO the only way to separate friend from foe using radar is to know the current airborne positions of your friends/neutrals (comm airlines)..all other targets can be classified as foes..
Remember tha KAL-007 shooting down by the USSR in 1983?

Off_The_Street is it a future possibility or do you think the software for this kind of Radar could exist now if we had the processing power? I can think of plenty of good applications for this kind of Radar should it be possible in the future to develop it. Civil air traffic control for instance would find it useful, if for instance a plane turned off its transponder as the terrorists did on 9/11 to know what kind of Aircraft they were dealing with and to be able to tell one Radar blip from another without having to rely on transponder info. Of course they wouldnt be a ble to tell what the actual flight was but they would be able to see what kind of Aircraft they were dealing with.