Stealth Detection

Very interesting read

Radar Detected

By Tomas Kellner

Rule number one for defense contractors: Don't tick off the U.S. government. A small Czech tech firm called Era developed and last year started selling a $10 million radar that can detect stealth jets, those heretofore invisible aircraft.

It lined up as possible buyers such countries as China, Pakistan and Vietnam.

This didn't please the U.S., which this fiscal year plans to spend $4.7 billion on 24 F-22 stealth striker jets and millions more to upgrade its two other stealth aircraft, the B-2 bomber and the F-117 Nighthawk.

So the U.S. bought one of the Czech radars, called Vera-E, to test its "effectiveness and technical aspects," according to Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. Vera apparently works, or at least well enough that the U.S. State Department suggested the Czech government reconsider foreign sales of it. China had ordered six of the machines. A U.S. ally and NATOmember since 1999, the Czech Republic scuttled the sale. "We discussed the issue with them, but the decision was theirs," said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher.

Vera works by listening for signals emitted by the planes it follows. It consists of three antennas and one central module, which triangulate and track as many as 200 targets at once from as far as 280 miles away. The mobile antennas fit on a truck; since they do not send out any signals, Vera is extremely hard to find and destroy.

At the moment the 140-employee Era has a nice product--but it has sold only two so far. Chief Executive Miroslav Sotona declined comment.


-J~Rock

Edit: Please post a link to your information, article, etc. Common ATS practice/standard. Avoid total copy-n-paste jobs also.
Here is the link to the above article:
Radar Detected
When applicable, ALWAYS give proper credit to your source(s)


[edit on 17-11-2004 by Seekerof]

I was under the impression that some radars were already becoming capable of barely tracing some of the public stealth planes, namely the f117. I believe I read a post about that on here....am I on the right track?

I would guess even with that being said any mass selling of stealth detecting radar would get the governments attention.

Cameron

One interesting point is that is not an active system, it just listens. One would imagine that we have the capability to mask the signals coming from the aircraft.

Originally posted by J Rock
One interesting point is that is not an active system, it just listens. One would imagine that we have the capability to mask the signals coming from the aircraft.

Very intresting indeed! In theory stealth aircraft are Supposed to be an electromagnetic "Black Hole" i.e. they are not supposed to admit and stray electromagnetic signals. Wonder if the stealth doesn't work they way they have been saying it does? It's not proof, but it is something to stop and thing about! What else don't we know about these planes?

Tim
ATS Director of Counter-Ignorance

Not hard to say such technology goes trough black market to China or any other nations who wish to buy em, its just sold as software version with blueprints to manufactured elsewhere.

This technology radar only recieves EM signals from aircraft activated radar. If aircraft shuts down it's radar, the system will recieve nothing. I highly doubt this can detect f-117, because it doesn't have active radar. Also I don't know if it can locate new F-22 radar, because it should be difficult to track.
Besides in order for system to work you need 3 radars in 20 miles region. This radars needs to comunicate together and if the comunication is jammed or 1 radar is destroyed the whole system will not work.

Take a look at the last paragraph here

It says "The system uses techniques that allow it to process signals emitted by airborne...secondary surveillance radar/'identification friend or foe transponders..." and so forth.

The point I wanted to bring up is that it can detect secondary surveillance radar and IFF signals. All aircraft emit an IFF signal. The F-117 also utilizes a FLIR for targeting, which I conclude to be a secondary surveillance radar.
The point being that Steath Aircraft, although "invisible" to radar, do seem to have other vulnerabilities.

hello

just wanted to add some points..

1. todays stealth aicraft are no "electromagnetic black-holes" , they still reflect radar waves, but either absorb enough of the waves energy to make it "invisible" or scatter the waves "away" from the radar receiver ( thats why the 117 looks the way it does), its most likely a combination of both effects. but a stealth ( meaning a really, radar wise invisble aircraft ) is not yet in production.

2. a radar detection network with more than one different station/receiver ( different locations) can detect these birds.

3. FLIR is the "forward looking infrad red" which is used for targeting, surveilance etc. but as it utilizes infrared sensors it's a passive system wich does not give away any information about the plane it self. these systems are very effective especially the russian IR targeting systems in planes from mig29 up..the new su's are all equiped with these systems (the small "ball" in front of the canopy)

now to the passive detection system..thats really interesting. every airforce plane sends data at one or another time and this data is of course nothing more than a em-wave which can be detected...would be nice to know what communications are used during a stealth attack
i can understand that the us is not very happy about better detection of their toys, but they have never received the right for a monopoly of military technology.

Originally posted by J Rock
Take a look at the last paragraph here

It says "The system uses techniques that allow it to process signals emitted by airborne...secondary surveillance radar/'identification friend or foe transponders..." and so forth.

The point I wanted to bring up is that it can detect secondary surveillance radar and IFF signals. All aircraft emit an IFF signal. The F-117 also utilizes a FLIR for targeting, which I conclude to be a secondary surveillance radar.
The point being that Steath Aircraft, although "invisible" to radar, do seem to have other vulnerabilities.

Just because aircrafts now emits IFF signales doesn't mean they need to do it always, especially during single stealth attack mision.

FLIR is NOT RADAR. It is passive forward looking IR system and sends no EM waves.

This was always going to happen. I think it's one of the reasons the US is still the only country to have stealth planes in service (by that i mean ones that have great emphesis on stealth at the cost of design). The newer US planes also seem to have less stealthy designs like the JSF. The B-2 bomber and F-117 were very powerful for a long while but like all technology their advantage will be countered in time. It will be interesting to see if stealth planes become widespread or if the fear of them being countered by improved radar will offset the cost and design limits of making stealth planes.

I stumbled upon this article on fas

Another limitation of stealth aircraft is their vulnerability to detection by bi-static radars. The contouring of a stealth aircraft is designed to avoid reflecting a radar signal directly back in the direction of the radar transmitter. But the transmitter and receiver of a bi-static radar are in separate locations -- indeed, a single transmitter may be used by radar receivers scattered over a wide area. This greatly increases the odds that at least one of these receivers will pickup a reflected signal. The prospects for detection of stealth aircraft by bi-static radar are further improved if the radar transmitter is space-based, and thus viewing the aircraft from above, the direction of its largest radar cross section.

I looks like they are more vulnerable than we are being led to believe

J Rock - You said 2 have been sold, one to the US and the other to.....

J Rock - You said 2 have been sold, one to the US and the other to.....

The article doesn't say who it was sold to, but I would guess that whomever received it will probably reverse engineer it , improve upon it and re-sell it themselves

J~Rock

Originally posted by J Rock
All aircraft emit an IFF signal. The F-117 also utilizes a FLIR for targeting, which I conclude to be a secondary surveillance radar.

Couple of points:

1) IFF can be turned on and off at the whim of the pilot. No doubt combat jets over denied terratory would turn thier IFF transponders off.

2) FLIR stands for foreward looking infrared. No radar is involved and its a passive system. It may be possible to detect a laser from the targeting pod, but that is an iffy deal at best.

i asked a member of the eurofighter project here in the uk(i guy in a position to have substantial knowledge on the aircraft) whether the fact that the eurofighter has little staelth technology would put it at a great disadvantage, with repsect to the f-22,35,117 and b2 aircraft. his answer was pretty blunt. to his knowledge stealth technology has a far less concealing effect than is generally perceived, and that detecting these aircraft is not a huge problem to the air force. i would assume that with comprehensive modern radar coverge using link 16 involving the eurofighter platform, awacs, stand of radar (astor or whatever they call it these days) aned ground based units, that the battlefield radar coverage is very high, more than enough to detect a low observable aircraft.

also the problem of reducing the heat signal from engine exhausts is still an issue, along with the thrust vectoring of the f-22 means that it does give a radr trace. allthough with the development of fluidic thrust vectoring in the future both these problems could be reduced.

Here is a new angle that we can take on this. Stealth detection is not limited to Aircraft. Here is an article on LO Cruise Missile detection. So is it suffice to say that if we can detect a stealthy cruise missle, we should be able to detect any LO aircraft?

In this project, we have developed computationally efficient algorithms and adaptive architecture with optimized overall performance (statistical and computational) for real-time reliable detection and tracking of low-observable targets in IRST systems. Despite the fact that we focus on an IRST against cruise missiles over land and sea cluttered backgrounds, the results are equally applicable to other sensors (e.g., Radar, Lidar) and other kinds of targets (e.g. ballistic missiles).