Experimental simulation of retrodirective cross-eye jamming

Experimental measurements that accurately simulate the effect of a retrodirective cross-eye jammer on a monopulse radar are described. The accuracy of a recently published extended analysis of retrodirective cross-eye jamming and the limitations of the conventional phase-front analysis of cross-eye jamming are illustrated by the experiments.The Armaments Corporation of South Africa (Armscor) and the National Research Foundation (NRF).http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/ai201

The practical implementation of a retrodirective cross-eye jammer by using software defined radio (SDR)

Dissertation (MEng (Electronic Engineering))--University of Pretoria, 2022.Radar-guided missiles have the potential to cause extreme damage to vital military assets. Although traditional deception techniques can deceive radars in range and Doppler shift, only a few methods can deceive them in angle. Cross-eye jamming was identified as a possible countermeasure against angular radar threats. This electronic attack (EA) method works by artificially creating the worst case of glint in angular radars. Numerous analyses of cross-eye jamming exist in the literature. The earlier analyses were derivative glint analyses that made two incorrect assumptions. The first was to use linear fits to the monopulse antenna patterns, which is only valid when the target platform is on broadside of the radar. The second was to assume that the target platform is an infinite distance from the radar, which is not possible. The analyses also did not consider retrodirectivity. It was only during a later cross-eye jamming analysis that the limitations were identified and corrected. The limitations in the analysis could have been identified much sooner if practical measurements were made. The extended cross-eye jamming analysis made fewer assumptions and was proven accurate by numerous simulations and some experimental results. However, the only available experiments where the radar rotation was considered did not implement true retrodirectivity but simulated it by combining isolated channel measurements. A need was identified for the development of a truly-retrodirective cross-eye jammer in a laboratory environment to expand the body of knowledge available about cross-eye jamming. The cost-effective jammer would be used to identify any real-world effects or anomalies that could not be predicted by the extended analysis or identified by simulation. This dissertation presents the development of a truly-retrodirective cross-eye jammer by using a software-defined radio (SDR). The development is accompanied by a method of calibrating the cross-eye jammer to obtain the ideal magnitude factor and phase difference between the retrodirective paths by minimising the magnitude of the sum-channel return of a monopulse radar. The developed system was tested in an anechoic environment against a self-implemented phase-comparison monopulse radar. It was shown that significant angular errors could be induced. The angular errors were larger than 10° at broadside of the radar. This equated to a minimum miss-distance of around 1 m at a range of 6 m. It was shown that a cross-eye gain of around ten was obtained, which resulted in the indicated angle of the radar never becoming zero, regardless of the radar rotation. This suggested that tracking radars, such as that used by active homing missiles, would lose lock on the target platform. Further experiments also proved the jammer to be retrodirective, with large angular errors for all rotations of the jammer antennas. All results correlated very well with that predicted by the extended analysis, with only minor deviations between radar rotations of 0° and 5°. After further investigation, it was concluded that the deviations were most likely caused by mutual coupling between the radar antennas and were not caused by a reduction in the performance of the jammer.Electrical, Electronic and Computer EngineeringMEng (Electronic Engineering)Unrestricte

Phase‐conjugating retrodirective cross‐eye jamming

A cross‐eye jammer based on a phase‐conjugating (PC) retrodirective array is proposed. Such PC cross‐eye jammers eliminate the delay inherent in traditional Van‐Atta (VA) cross‐eye jammers and induce errors in radars that use the same antenna beam for transmission and reception, while VA cross‐eye jammers do not. Validated simulations are provided to confirm the effectiveness and retrodirective properties of the PC cross‐eye jammer.https://ietresearch.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1350911xhj2021Industrial and Systems Engineerin

Limiting apparent target position in skin-return influenced cross-eye jamming

It is desirable to limit the apparent target to one side of a retrodirective cross-eye jammer despite the variation caused by platform skin return. The relationship between the jammer parameters and the jammer-to-signal ratio (JSR) to ensure that this occurs is investigated. When this relationship is not satisfied, the proportion of the apparent targets generated on the opposite side of the jammer is determined.This work was supported by the Armaments Corporation of South Africa (Armscor) under Contract KT521896.http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/arnumber=6558044hb201

Implementation and testing of a retrodirective cross-eye jammer

One of the few electronic attack techniques that can deceive radars in angle is cross-eye jamming, which mimics the naturally-occurring phenomenon glint. The extreme tolerance requirements of cross-eye jamming mean that a retrodirective implementation is required, but published measurements of cross-eye jamming either ignore the retrodirective implementation or only simulate it. The implementation of a retrodirective cross-eye jammer and its testing against a monopulse radar are described. A procedure for calibrating the jammer is outlined and is shown to be effective by achieving large angular errors. The measured results agree well with the extended analysis of cross-eye jamming and confirm that the implemented jammer is retrodirective. Specifically, the ability of a cross-eye jammer to generate an indicated angle that never becomes zero, thereby potentially breaking a tracking lock, is confirmed.http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?reload=true&punumber=7hj2023Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineerin

Passive Interfering Method for InSAR Based on Circularly Moving Strong Scatterers

A novel jamming method based on circularly moving strong scatterers is proposed. The jamming signal model is presented first, and the corresponding imaging results are derived through a range-Doppler algorithm. Detailed analysis shows that the proposed method can decrease the correlation, produce interferometric phase bias, result in failure of phase unwrapping, and reduce the accuracy of the digital elevation model. Simulation results are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method

Deception jamming against anti-ship missiles which use doppler beam sharpening modes

Missile seekers are becoming increasingly more capable of using Doppler Beam Sharpening (DBS) modes as part of the homing cycle, which requires new countermeasures against this mode. One type of countermeasure, is to create false targets within the seeker DBS image. This thesis presents two implementation methods to insert false targets into DBS images. Both methods are used to create false targets at a precise location within a seeker DBS image, but are implemented in different ways. The first method proposes repeat jamming with a time-varying delay, whilst the second proposes a fixed delay and adding a specific Doppler shift to received waveforms. The effects of tracking errors on the position of the false target are analysed, both analytically and with simulations and used to assess the practical implementation of the jamming scheme. An experimental DBS system was built to test the effectiveness of the jamming scheme against a platform moving in steps and assess errors caused by incorrectly estimating the seeker trajectory. The overall result of the thesis is that using the derived jamming methods, false targets can be created at specific locations in the DBS image of the victim radar, providing the trajectory of the victim radar is known

Modulated Microwave Retro-reflectors and Their Applications

This work seeks to investigate the viability of establishing communications links using modulated microwave reflectors, and explores potential application areas. A primary and underlying objective has been to combine modulation of radar cross section (RCS) with the wide-angle RCS response of a microwave retro-reflector so as to yield a transponder which imparts information content on the reflected spectrum. Since the RCS is electrically large, the communications link is directive and yet the transponder is not a transmitter of microwave energy and hence has modest power needs. The microwave retro-array was quickly identified as the most promising structure to achieve these aims, and hence the further objectives of the work have been to investigate this structure and fabricate working prototypes so as to: • achieve a manufacturable structure. • perform measurements to compare with theoretical models of behaviour. • explore the limits of performance, and seek to expand them. • identify applications and markets. • explore and pursue such related discoveries that may occur. All the above aims have been explored to some extent, and the findings have been reported in the body of the thesis. The background and historical context is discussed in chapter 1, while chapter 2 reports on the construction and characterisation of 16- element modulated retro-array prototypes operating at a 2.5 GHz carrier frequency. The applied nature of this work is extended in chapters 3 and 4 to printed integrated circuits for passive transponders, and the scaling of these methods to frequencies around 9.2 GHz. Theoretical models for the properties of much larger arrays are presented in chapter 5, and range finding applications and results presented in chapter 6. Two applications are then discussed for which the required array dimensions are estimated, before closing with conclusions and suggestions for future work

Defense Technical Information Center thesaurus

This DTIC Thesaurus provides a basic multidisciplinary subject term vocabulary used by DTIC to index and retrieve scientific and technical information from its various data bases and to aid DTIC`s users in their information storage and retrieval operations. It includes an alphabetical posting term display, a hierarchy display, and a Keywork Out of Context (KWOC) display

A Long-range Fine-scale RF Positioning System Using Tunneling Tags

Fine-scale positioning systems using inexpensive, low-power, and reliable smart tags enables numerous commercial and scientific applications. Internet of Things (IoT) applications, such as asset tracking, contact tracing, and autonomous driving, require wireless technologies with both the long ranges of conventional wireless links and the low power consumption of passive and semi-passive Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. This dissertation proves that using the Received Signal Phase (RSP)-based positioning method and Tunneling tags at 5.8 GHz breaks the range limit of fine-scale RFID positioning systems. A frequency hopping reader operating in the 5.8 GHz Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) band is designed and implemented in this work. Experimental results yield a one-dimensional distance estimation error of less than 1% at ranges of 100 m when a clear Line-of-Sight (LoS) is available in indoor and outdoor environments. Compared to Received Signal Strength (RSS)-based positioning techniques, the average positioning accuracy is improved by a factor of 51 at ranges of tens of meters. In Non-Line-of-Sight (NLoS) scenarios, the proposed system achieves an estimation error of less than 1.9%. Experimental results also demonstrate that the RSP-based positioning technique allows estimating a mobile reader's two-dimensional position with an average error of 0.17 m in an outdoor environment. Also, a channel sounder implementation using the same hardware configuration further increases the accuracy in multipath environments. Calculation based on the system specifications projects a sub-meter level accuracy at ranges of more than 1 km is feasible using the proposed method.Ph.D