I worked on the E2-C aircraft in the 80's. I used to walk around on the flight deck of the USS Independence and USS Forrestal with a box called a Sniffer, to check that all of the planes Mode IV was working, and had the right code before leaving the deck.
I worked on the actual coding machine and I could not travel anywhere to a friendly country without a special permission. Kind of ruins your life when the military knows more about your new gf then you do. lol
Precise and crisp video. I have a few questions though. 1) How deal the receiver deal with interference from multiple aircrafts? If random timing delay is used then also the message may have collision with other messages. 2) Is the pulse a single tone sine wave or is there any chirping inside it? 3) What is the pulse width?
Those mysterious black boxes in the cockpit make a whole lot more sense now. Would an IFF reply or lack of reply constitute sufficient evidence for a positive friendly or hostile identification?
The answer to your question is not a short one. As it so happens it's also the topic of the next video. In that video we'll go down the checklist describing how distant aircraft are IDed.
15 year Avionics mechanic here: Every time our EW systems detect a new radar, we investigate and log it with whatever machine it's on. A terrain/weather radar on a C-130 is going to be tuned to be good at that, and an air track radar on an F-16 is going to be tuned to be good at that job. Now, there are EW decoys that intentionally pretend to be another aircraft, and that complicates things, but we can watch a "C-130" going mach 1, and figure out that it's not a "C-130". I hope that helps!
@@rasherbilbo452 The key to program the mode 4 had 64 pins with 26 positions each, it was inserted then removed into the front of the mode 4 decryption box and if the airplane crashed the system would reset all the combinations. you could get the box but not the code. It could be changed as needed daily or every 2 hrs etc or if you lost a plane just in case the enemy would use a down plane's box to carry a nuke over your territory.
