Stand-Off Jammer Task

EW aircraft hover out of range of enemy missiles (Missile Engagement Zone, MEZ) and create a penetration corridor for friendly aircraft by disturbing the enemy’s air defence radars (Figure 1).

Its main role is to provide large area suppression to deny the overall picture to the enemy.

Figure 1: battlefield typical environment for an ESCORT JAMMER Mission

A great amount of EM energy has to be radiated at an entire adversary region to blind the IADS sensors, but that implies a very high ERP:

• Stand-Off Jamming aircraft flies well outside the lethal range of the Integrated Air Defence System (IADS), so at a very long distance, while the protected platform goes very close to the IADS

• Very often, the jammer is illuminated by the side-lobes of the radar while the protected platform is in the main lobe.

To mitigate the ERP problem, the EM spectrum is split into sub-bands and multiple narrower band transmitters are used to cover a large portion of the EM spectrum.
However, multiple high power transmitters and associated power generators, even using the most recent technology that exhibits a more efficient power generation, still require a large power consumption, volume and mass and an A/C of large size is the only platform capable of accommodating such a demanding apparatus, especially if very long distance operations are required.

The use of a large jamming power distributed over a wide area, in Stand-Off mode, allows to blind the radars of the adversary air defence but, however, also constitutes a source of interference for all friendly forces and places a significant limit to the operation.

To overcome this obvious drawback a very efficient interoperability & coordination process has to be put in place supported by a dedicated in-Platform EW layer of integration that coordinates all the EW activities performed inside the platform and contribute to the overall EMSM (Electro Magnetic Spectrum Management) and RF Interoperability.