How Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites could help China detect US stealth fighters
Posted by m71nu@reddit | aviation | View on Reddit | 6 comments
Posted by m71nu@reddit | aviation | View on Reddit | 6 comments
GrammarNaziBadge0174@reddit
A fellow engineer and I agree this may work in theory but be impossible to implement in reality.
Ask yourself. Why would China announce this capability, if it actually worked?
Or is this to get USA to spend $10B going down a rabbit hole to see IF it could be made to work? To sow FUD.
RedactedCallSign@reddit
As has been said before:
Detection =\= Weapons quality track.
Low frequency search radars have been able to detect certain stealth aircraft under specific conditions for years. However, those wavelengths are not well suited to guiding weapons onto a target. They can just tell you that there’s likely an aircraft in that general direction. Often they can’t even tell you altitude.
So you could maybe put a missile in the rough grid square of where the aircraft might be, but even if the missile has its own onboard radar, it will have a difficult time locking the target.
The true purpose of “stealth” is to deny locks by radar guided weapons.
So while Star Link might be able to tell you that there’s a stealth aircraft in the area, the best you could do with that information is to scramble your own fighter to that location, and attempt to find the targets themselves. But due to new long-range (BVR) missile and radar developments by the US… those intercept fighters will be dead long before they can get a weapons quality track.
GrammarNaziBadge0174@reddit
TIL. Thanks!
Recoil42@reddit
"China" didn't announce anything. As per the article, this was a study done by a research team at the school of electronic information at Wuhan University, in a paper published on August 26 in the Journal of Signal Processing.
It's just a research paper, not an announcement of military capability. Researchers do research in China, just like they do research everywhere else in the world.
PotentialMidnight325@reddit
Idk. A friend of mine who works as an electrical design engineer for a well known radar and missle maker in Europe said they did it already at the ILA in Berlin. And he is the furthest away from anybody showboating that I can imagine. The Americans were said not to be to happy about it.
therealgariac@reddit
There are old stories about detecting stealth aircraft from cellular tower RF reflection.
While this isn't side channel hacking in the traditional sense, all these obscure detection schemes generally don't pan out.