AESA radars have a problem. 

I discern from this video that you have reduced your personal radar cross section. Congratulations on your success!

It looks like you have slimmed down. I hope you're feeling better. This is the best military aircraft channel on RU-vid

You are looking much healthier. Congratulations. My 87 year old father, who is blind, and I enjoy your content. He recently caught on to who Otis is and he got a good laugh once I described Otis and his function in your videos.

You are looking amazing brother, nothing put a smile on my face more than seeing you standing there and and looking happy and healthy. The AESA stuff that's just icing on the cake 😁

OTIS intro is still killing it.

Nice touch on the four progress bars for cost/complexity, heat, processing requirements, and scan loss. Otis' choice of supporting graphics and video clips continue to just nail it. 👍 Another great job, well done, thanks!

I love your videos, they are very informative, I learn so much from them. I hope you are doing well, it's good to see you back making videos. Keep up the good work 🙂

The Gripen E would frequently employ its AESA GaA radar as a passive ISR antenna and the wingtip and tail GaN antennas as active radars in narrow beam mode. But, it may also be used as RWR, EW, and SIGINT, which is not only clever but also an efficient and effective method to employ radar.

I learn a lot each time I watch. Thank you.

OTIS intro got me, thanks for the video boss

Regarding your last point, off-boresight deflection affecting the lobe pattern is an issue for any type of phased array not just active/AESA arrays.

Great vid. Always love the long form deep dives you do 😋

Another excellent video. It makes learning about aeronautics fun and simple.

Great video as always. You seem to be recovering really well!

You’re looking great, glad to see you up and about again.

Excellent details, learned a lot! My guesses before watching the video were going to be issues with integration into 4++ fighters (that are actually fourth gen's built in the '80s and '90s) as a new mission computer (and perhaps new data bus) would require installation, let alone new screens in the cockpit(s), as well as the often upward sloped antenna arrays on AESA systems that would limit their vertical scan range. Very surprised to learn all of this! We were missing the videos, M7* Nice to see you back!

Another brilliant video ! I always figured that there must be a cost to all that extra performance, I was right about the heat but I didn't count on the weight or the lack of off-boresight sensitivity. keep up the great work.

AESA stands for Active Electronically Scanned Array, which is a type of radar system that uses an array of small, solid-state transmit/receive modules to steer the radar beam electronically. This is different from traditional radar systems, which use a single antenna to scan the radar beam mechanically. AESA radars have several advantages over traditional radar systems. They are more reliable, have better performance in cluttered environments, and are harder to detect and jam. They also allow for multiple beams to be steered simultaneously, which can be used for advanced capabilities such as electronic warfare, surveillance, and target tracking. AESA radars are used in a variety of applications, including military aircraft, ground-based radar systems, and naval vessels. They are particularly well-suited for use in modern military applications, where they are used to detect and track targets with high precision and accuracy.

Great job mate. One of the most informative channels on RU-vid.

Looking good man, hope your health is improving. Excellent content as always

I hope that you are healing well and on your way to healthy town. I enjoy your insights on military matters

LOL. Saying lots of interesting content is a massive understatement! You do great stuff.

Great to see you again Sir. You are looking well.

Every episode is just top notch!!

Well, that was all very nice and informative, thanks meat man. Now, may we have the video that Otis made or was going to make? 🤖

Awesome video! I saw a video of the Gripen-E with the mechanical pivot for the AESA radar and thought, oh that's a good idea. 🤔😂

Looking great!

Another great video! 🎉🎉

About the scan loss: it's the phenomenon of decreasing loss then the beam in an antenna array is pointed away from broadside (generally simply not perpendicular to the plane of the array). In case the array doesn't have any fancy beamforming (same amplitude, progressive phase shift between the elements), the scan loss follows cosine function -> in ideal case: broadside = 0 dB scan loss, 60 degree scan angle = ~ -3 dB scan loss, etc (depending on the array configuration). It's basically just about the geometry of the array in respect to the radiated direction. The maximum gain is a function of the projected surface area (electrical) of the array to a given angle.

Man you got in shape. Great job , you look amazing. As always Quality content

Get well soon!!

गहन शोध , स्पष्ट अवलोकन , प्रज्ञावान विश्लेषण , उपकरणों का सुन्दर चित्रण और बहुत सुन्दर प्रस्तुति।👏👏👏

Woah you look thinner!!!!

high five for doing the hard work to look like you do now. you look great!

Based on current high end PC/Super Computer tech. I suspect we have the processing power in modern CPU/SEC's to do what AESA requires. But making said tech harden for combat/military use is probably still a few years away, which I admit is not that long. SABR (Scalable Agile Beam Radar) tech is also helping make AESA radars more agile and useable when dealing with multiple targets. FYI, its also part of the reason the US semiconductor ban's on China, to limit their AESA radar technology.

its also a great deal less sensitive to the aircraft's nose-cone creating null areas

Looking good I pray your feeling better and GOD will heal your issues. Thanks for the videos

Looking great dude!

You look great man glad to see it.😊

Very nice video as always, Can you do video on airborne early warning ?

"Otis, I'm still here"... Happily YES

What you are speaking of is what i taught in My F-16 Avionics Maintenance instruction back in 1970s at Hill AFB. Gallium Actinide processor Chips were the NEW KID on the block in the Electronic Countermeasures Systems of the block 3 AVIONICS systems of that time. It is nice to see that 50 year technology is now declassified. I wonder what is really out there.

Even within an "all-digital" AESA there are important differences in whether the beamforming is implemented as a preprocess (for example in a separate FPGA/CPU/whatever) or integrated with doppler and monopulse processing. The latest edition of Skolnick's Radar Handbook has a chapter that explores this in some depth, written by a Northrop-Grumman engineer who worked on the APY-9.

You should look into civilian 5G MIMO basestations. They use the same principles as AESA radars, in a less complex use case (more constrained). But a lot of those civilian technologies could be scaled up to meet the expanded operations envelope of a military AESA radar.

Looking good Millennium 7.

You look great, well done.

Thanks

I would imagine that you have to look at the total life cycle costs for the AESA radar to get an accurate picture. Beyond slower refresh rates and predictable scan patterns legacy, gimbaled antennas tended to be high failure after being exposed to prolonged high g maneuvers. AESA systems are usually designed as an integral part of the airframe with a life expectancy on the same order as the air frame. That seems to be the goal; as to what’s real I don’t know. What I do believe would be a cost-driver would be for the service’s repair depots to develop the organic capability to repair these arrays for when Murphy has an influence in their reliability. Contractor depot support gets super expensive over time. Nevertheless, modern AESA radars are a thing of beauty.

Some of the extra costs are recouped by lower maintenance costs compared to a mech-scan radar.

I work in Linthicum Heights and enjoy your videos 😁

Happy you are still alive.

Bravo.

Nice video.

Now I can see why drone/loyal wingman are essential to the future of Air Combat. The deflection disadvantage can be alleviated by having more "eyes" in the sky.

Man thats knowledge

Excellent video , M7! This explain also because either the Hybrid PESA is so diffuse: they have most of the Cons of AESA for what they came to signal processing (compared to old PESA, whose phase shifters just steered the wave) but having a centralized RF emitter they could retain a much more lighter and above all leaner antenna so that it could be steered without problems to reach a +/-100° of scan sector while they also need a lot less cooling and avoid to became too nose-heavy. So, for a 4++gen planes and above all an air superiority fighter like the Su-355 they were a no-issue component while it took a very long time to get a steerable AESA antenna on the Gripen-E and Tiphoon. And naturally it explain also because they have installed instead a L-band AESA on the wings of the same Su-35 or because the Su-57 has both L- and X-band antenna all around.

It´s incredible how much the same problems and solutions applied to AESA radar also apply to professional audio engineering. At this point, the common ground is not just wave mechanics but all the technology of filters and analog vs. digital signal creation, sum, heat dissipation (Johnson noise), etc. It would be interesting to see if some of the most forward-looking solutions regarding the quantization of the wave signal (both in AD and DA) in audio, such as describing a waveform with a density distribution of a binary impulse, might be a solution also for other systems such as radars in the manipulation of complex signals, especially at high frequencies. There is no free lunch, of course, but both of these technologies are aiming for the same goal and are hitting the same wall from a physical perspective. Great video, you´re always getting better. One more speculation from my side: what if the use of optical circutry would improve signal loss and heat creation and also would help defeating the signal losses at high freq. due to induction in metallic conductors?

I would expect that high tech military equipment that uses AESA would have ASICs specifically made for the computations that are required.

In addition to what was mentioned, AESA will always have worse sensitivity than mechanically scanned antenna of the same size. In fact, a pure digital beamforming system will always be worse than analog beamforming system in terms of achievable sensitivity. Finally, any array antenna suffers reduction in beam quality when scanning far off axis. For that reason, hybrid systems where some beamforming is done in analog domain or via mechanical steering are used for long-range RADAR applications, and will often outperform a pure digital system.

The deflection angle of the main lobe is limited by how close the modules can be packed.

The Erieye AESA surveillance radar produces so much heat in operation that it has a ram scoop to collect air to cool it in flight and AFAIK it cannot be operated on the ground without supplemental cooling.

Nice. An FPGA should be able to address the latency/bandwidth problem of software DSP while remaining field programmable.

The General Electric XA100 is an American adaptive cycle engine designed to provide more energy and better cooling for the F-35. It will combine well with the new radar. It's all on schedule.

Speaking to a engineer from BAE systems at the 2023 Avalon airshow , mentioned any thing greater than 500Mhz sample rate and 16 bit depth is classified hardware has vendor export control, go figure what software defined radios the military can play with

It appears that your area ruling has been improved. Acceleration will be much better. AESA is complex but the benefits are many. It's mandatory at this point. Another good video.

Back in the 70s Active; Passive arrays *for-runner of the aesa system .. were in more locations than just the nose of the F-16 And Still are I am sure. Even then we had three or four systems using them together, and sharing processing power between systems . and storage for gathering unknows as well.

The Massive MIMO in modern wireless communication has pretty much the same challenges: expensive, high power consumption and high processing complexity. A hybrid digital-analog architecture is therefore a more practical choice.

I have to watch all your videos more than once. You teach me so much.

Sir, you have lost weight, and you are looking very healthy! Great to see you again

Have said this before, we need more Ottis screentime!!! Ps, can have a video narrated by Ottis on April 1st?

Question: Given this is a "Multifunction Array", when will it be able to emit an energy shield from it so we can finally call it the main deflector?

Otis has left the building.... ;)

wondering if the AA10 alamo IR is effective against stealth planes?

An overview of the analysis by differential equations required for the thermal management of modern combat aircraft would be interesting.

Not only is scan loss a problem, but so are side lobes. As soon as you start steering phased arrays, the side lobes get very nasty, both in their amplitude and their phase behaviour. The amount of digital processing power required to mitigate this behaviour is extremely large; other solutions typically involve analogue filters on each array element, which has negative implications for size, weight and power consumption. The solutions in the naval world work quite well because of the large size of the array, but with airborne radars the quality is quite severely impacted.

Sir, can you do the difference between flat AESA radar and notch AESA radar. What is advantages and disadvantages both of the AESA radar with different parttern size on it such as flat and notch. What is the difference and performance of this AESA which has notch and flat radar.

Could an AAM with AESA be used in passive mode as an ARM?

What is EQ and what is M in the Digital Beamforming block

You did not mention the operating frequencies of AESA radar. Older radars had one T/R module and therefore operated on one frequency. If there are 100 T/R modules, can the radar use 100 different frequencies simultaneously? This shall make it impossible to jam or do countermeasures, which is a huge advantage.

i see an achilles heel to the evolution of sensors through software advancement rather than that of the hardware,. and that is, that it is likely that this approach will freeze the evolution of the hardware, because "lazy", because "bean counter", because "problem solved" mentalities. The advancement of actual hardware however, is at the core of paradigm shifts. I think a much superior strategy is to promote and insure the capability to rapidly evolve hardware itself through the use of software. the danger with "the new thinking", is that hardware dev atrophies because of the unwise reliance on software-only to advance a sensor system. we of course know that both are absolutely necessary.

radar tech should shift from radio WAVE to specially charged particles. and that can be ACCELERATED particles. do note particles and wave differences is merely in the amount of energy/mass(convertible). but charged particles that are smaller than an atom could pass through atom structures, and could leave "marking" in certain pulses that can be READ by the auxillary scanner. the particle based "radar" system will be able to detect MATERIALS even buried deep inside a bunker. for example, nuclear fuels inside nuclear reactors and warheads inside a submarine 1 kilometer below the ocean surface. nobody can hide from it.

As an AESA is in fact a collection of several radars, would it be possible to place the modules distributed along the fuselage and wings instead of clustering all together?

Thanks youtube for literally recommending this 8 times in my notification tab. I will not watch this video

Apg 77 vs irbis e hum who do you think wins....

Not related to this video, but you're my only hope to answer a question that has been bothering me for years. What effect, if any, does ground effect have on a supersonic aircraft?

Think about this carefully: What are the possible applications for a very high performance, very high bandwidth transmitter/receiver system that has a very wide range of operating frequencies and can operate on hundreds of discrete frequencies at the same time, and which is under full digital control with very advanced, highly capable signal processors? The applications are limited only by the absolute hardware frequency and bandwidth limits and the imagination and ingenuity of the engineering team. It's SO much more than just a radar now. It's a broadband receiver, and a broadband transmitter, or more accurately, hundreds of them all working at the same time.

I'm not sure if I get this right, but heat is induced by the array-elements sending signals for the most part, is that correct? If so, would it be an idea to put passive arrays around an air frame and have cheaper, unmanned UAVs packed with emitters act as the off board emitter elements of the AESA system, a bit similar like Hensholdt's passive coherent locator system? ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-RfqdLKFhGnQ.html&ab_channel=HENSOLDT I was also imagining these off board emitters could act as decoys/jammers or spoofing aids. I realize things may get overly complicated in a different way... For instance can such a system accurately target a hostile aircraft, make SAR images or do powerful jamming in specific bandwidths or frequencies? And what kind of processing power (and relating cooling issues) may bring that to the original fighter aircraft? Probably a bad idea. Sorry, just had a brain fart.

New radar technology are in development. "Quantum Radars".

Dear gentleman, thank you for your interesting videos. Is it possible you produce a video describing differences between Link 11, Link 16 and Link 22 Tactical Data Links? Thank you very much indeed.

Ottimo video, come sempre. Ti lascio due pensieri: 1) Apprezzo l'idea di posizionare una barra che indichi la durata del segmento che tratta un singolo argomento, ma in un tentativo di provare a semplificarti la vita (non sono un content creator e non so se questa cosa semplifichi davvero la vita), credo che esista già una funzione in youtube per rappresentare i diversi segmenti nella barra di scorrimento del video, così puoi suddividerlo "nativamente" senza aggiungere nessun overlay. Prova a vedere se può fare al caso tuo. 2) Sai, ogni volta che ti sento parlare di AESA rimango con una domanda. Il radar (o meglio I radar) dell'Eurofighter. Ne sento parlare da sempre. CAPTOR-E, CAESAR, mk1, mk2... non si capisce niente. Ogni cinque/dieci anni sembra che parta lo sviluppo di un nuovo sensore senza mai realmente finalizzare nulla. E' solo politica? Mancanza di armonizzazione dei requisiti? Mancanza di budget? Mancanza di competenze? Ho come l'idea che sotto ci sia una bella storia da raccontare, almeno per capire come mai l'aereo che dovrebbe rappresentare la punta di diamante delle forze aeronautiche di diverse potenze europee monti ancora dei radar "del secolo scorso".

You looking good sir keep up the good work hoping you got rid of the dairy products

👍👍

Nice overview, but you have to know that any advancement of substance comes with its own issues. These are not a disadvantage but the cost of having the advanced system.

Looking trim bud.

Would not AESAR be able to listen to all directions constantly and simultaneously given unlimited processing? That would be a great advantage if combined with a powerful transmitter positioned behind the receiver. The receiver would not need as much cooling and power while the transmitter could have a much bigger aperture and cooling surface than fits into the nose cone.

Please make more content about the Eurofighter!

What about cryogenically cooled signal processors?

Looks like the 6th gen. M7 has been deployed!

2:24 the teenager-proof telephone 😎

🤝