a reply to:
Sammamishman
In my failed attempt to become an engineer I did some basic DSP work and had a roommate whose dad worked for Bose. Waves are waves, whether they're
sound, light, radio, etc, and theoretically it's not that difficult (with enough processing power and a precise enough emitter) to mimic the signal
returns of a given signal in time with the original reflection.
It's the same basic principle that noise-cancelling headphones work on. They're not actually eliminating outside noise, they're merely outputting a
counterpoint signal to the original, and that's enough to trick the receiver (your ear) into thinking it's hearing nothing at all.
I'd imagine, in theory, that tricking the signals processing software of a given enemy radar wouldn't be that difficult, either. You just need to
know what sort of things the fourier transforms, etc are prone to filtering out (things like doppler shifts that are out of its reference range, etc),
and spam the receiver with similar returns to overwhelm the already-small return of your stealthy craft so that it gets lost in the noise. Think of
it as precision jamming.
From there, you can then have it pulse out a return of a given amplitude necessary to mimic the RCS of a certain target, and now, your stealth AWACS
looks identical to a global hawk or an F-18.
The real tough part of this would be the long and arduous process of testing a prototype against as many foreign radar systems as you could get your
hands on, while flying SIGINT missions to suck up the bandwidths and pulse profiles of as many of the radars that you COULDN'T simply
purchase/defect/otherwise acquire in order to make educated guesses about how they function and how best to "spoof" them.
Basically, CONSTANT PEG, but with foreign SAM and AEW&C systems, a process that I'm sure would be super mega ultra classified for a bunch of obvious
reasons. The end result would be, for all intents and purposes, the closest thing to a cloaking device that we've (probably) ever fielded. Yet
another reason why it was, until yesterday, super, ultra, mega, captain insano-levels of classified, since now you can hypothetically turn any
airframe with the RCS of a B-1B or F/A-18E/F/G or better into a stealth airframe with the flick of a switch.
edit on 3-3-2017 by Barnalby
because: (no reason given)