Chinese Radar Developments - KLJ series and others

very interesting here as part of the article to talk about diamond usage as heatsink for various applications and Huawei's interest and patents in it.

5G base station power amplifier is a pretty good proxy of the upper limit of what current material can withstand.

It says here that power amplifier density of single MMIC can reach 300 W/cm2.

if we put that inside the nose of a fighter jet.

Something with a 100 cm diameter nose (1m nose is basically flanker), that is 50*50*3.14 = 7850 cm2.

Even with that, the theoretical limit of the radar for power could be 2.355MW. Of course in reality, you might not want each MMIC to be side to side with each other, so it's going to be less than that.

But if we use something ike J-36 nose of 200cm diameter, you'd 4x that. So, that would be 8MW. Not that I think a fighter jet would actually be able to do that anytime soon, but with diamond substrate, the sky is the limit when it comes to radar power. At minimum, the constraint is not on the MMIC itself but rather whatever is providing the power & whatever is doing the cooling.

Back in the early radar days the fighter radars were into the hundreds kilowatts range, one of the most famous being the Smerch at 600kw, reportedly able to fry animals. Might we see the return of the triple digit kw radars soon? Modern trend of AESA uses for EA and DEW seems to indicate that.

mack8 said:

Back in the early radar days the fighter radars were into the hundreds kilowatts range, one of the most famous being the Smerch at 600kw, reportedly able to fry animals.

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Feels unlikely as today's fighter radars are mostly using High-Medium PRF, lots of pulses and lots of average power basically high duty cycle. High peak power of Smerch was the result of technology available at that time which can only allow Low PRF waveform and basically there was no means yet to solve ambiguity coming from using High PRF waveform. Thus Smerch use Low PRF, with short pulse and very high peak power level, but low duty cycle to provide adequate performance. The average power of Smerch afaik was only about 57 Watt.

Later radars like say Zaslon have High-medium and Low PRF as the processing are more advanced, Zaslon have 200 KHz PRF and thus higher average power of 2.5 KW. The peak power is somewhere along 10-12.5 KW. Irbis can reach 20 KW peak with average power Twice of that of Zaslon. Those were adequate for radar task.

Arguably tho, things like EA does not need much more or even less as with EA like jamming you will be using advanced waveform which mimic the enemy radar's emmission. This doesnt need much power except maybe tens of Watts. High power is only required for Noise jamming and this is rather inconvenient for fighter aircraft radar as steerable antenna is desireable as Noise jamming are typically done outside enemy weapon range and in race-track pattern similar as AEW.

DEW require so much more particularly to compensate for frequency mismatch say you want to attack missiles and to couple enough power to target, but might be with limited payoff for fighter aircraft radar, better to use laser or even missiles.

Stealth target better be handled by say other sensor which then can allow the radar to focus on specific area, range then can be achieved by trading off coverage and dwell time (smaller coverage = more dwell time can be allocated to an area = longer detection range)

Western news says that the JY-27 radar China sold to Venezuela，failed to detect incoming US planes

tonyget said:

Western news says that the JY-27 radar China sold to Venezuela，failed to detect incoming US planes

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Yes, but they don't see the whole story similar to the claims "Russian SAMs again failed miserably".

The point is - I heard it via a friend who was in Venezuela just last year, they ordered these systems and due to a lack of budget the kept them just outside, no hangars no true maintenance ... they were more or less wrecked by nature before they could ever do something!

Where there not claims about the JY-27s being ordered in the 2000s? Although they operate more than just this type of Chinese radar.

tonyget said:

Western news says that the JY-27 radar China sold to Venezuela，failed to detect incoming US planes

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If you are posting this directly without any comment then you aren't operating at a level of discourse that we expect here.

Please offer something more to that news instead of regurgitating it and add some of your own thoughts.

It is hard to gauge the effectiveness of the radar system due to limited information regarding how it was operationally deployed. I think the bigger question is whether the potential buyers of this and other Chinese systems will be swayed by the negative publicity. Even if they have access to more detailed information and conclude that the radar was not used as intended, they may face pressures from the public/other stakeholders due to the bad publicity.
Of course, it is entirely possible that the radar system _was_ used according to some minimum standard of competence and was simply not good enough.
More broadly, I do question whether China should be selling military systems, especially high-end ones, to countries which will likely not utilise them correctly and thus bring down the reputability of Chinese MIC.

tonyget said:

Western news says that the JY-27 radar China sold to Venezuela，failed to detect incoming US planes

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Well, they likened Xi firing away a few guys to Stalin's Purge and said an SSN in Wuhan sunk. They also gave platform to that guy who claimed the Chinese soldiers were using missile fuel for hot pot. I will not even speculate about the integration or maintenance or training. Even if they were perfect it wouldn't matter at all. If the USA cannot handle ~10 old early warning radars it should just disband its military.

Hi,
I think China should be selling high end ones, as usually china export those systems which
are already 7/9 years of age in their system & of cource China must have moved over to that
specific technology way above the export level to other countries.
thank you