[EA-3167]

Right, look at the US' current jammer suite, the AN/ALQ-99, while it has issues it's unbelievably powerful. One of the downsides is that it jams the AESA radars of friendlies in the area, including the plane using the jammer itself.

The next gen replacement sounds like an absolute monster too, but without some of the donwsides like the need for a ram air turbine to power it.

[exar0815]

Fun fact: Airborne Jammers like these might be one of the last places of state of the art technology where the good old vacuum tube is still better than semiconductors.

For large power amplifiers, especially with power and power-density considerations, nothing beats a travelling wave tube.

And on the ground with "unlimited" power and cooling? Well, there's always the Klystron...

[dylan604]

> One of the downsides is that it jams the AESA radars of friendlies in the area, including the plane using the jammer itself.

So you just lob in a heat seeker at the middle of the noise, and hope.

Then again, if you have an airborne source of jamming, you know you have bigger problems following. How much effort do you spend trying to knock out the jamming vs preparing for what is inevitably following? Flying in jammers from the opposite direction of an attack to draw in fighters to the wrong area is as elementary as attack options go.

[Terr_]

> So you just lob in a heat seeker at the middle of the noise, and hope.

There's already another category of missile for that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-radiation_missile

[red-iron-pine]

and Iraq I, Iraq II, and UKR-RUS have shown that they freakin work

[kayodelycaon]

It's even easier than that. You use a missile (or bomb) programmed to lock onto the source of the jamming.

[exar0815]

Except the jammer oversaturates your receiver or even burns it out. Or causes it to see ghost targets.

[dylan604]

The heat seeker would have problems unless you launched from behind it, which would be problematic if you're launching from the ground, depending on the jamming plane. A steathly plane with the heat sources minimized might not be detected by a heat seeker if launched towards an oncoming source

[ambichook]

heat seekers havent been rear aspect only in decades, all aspect IR missiles are the norm now. the main issue is that most NATO IR missiles are very short range. much easier to instead program your radar guided missile to lock the big glowy thing and explode in its face

[sandworm101]

And that is an airborne radar, which is limited to the power generated by its little fan. A dedicated ground-based jammer might be plugged into a generator hauled on the back of a flatbed truck.