Obama to cut AWACS fleet by 25%

American Thinker ^ | 3/11/2014 | Ed Lasky

[lentulusgracchus]

"The bistatic UAV would also be able to serve as an adjunct to the E-2, TPS-75 and other air/ground radars."

The TPS-75 is the truck- and air-transportable successor to (and still has a high degree of "commonality" with) the earlier TPS-43E2 air-search radar. Both are owned by the USAF and are C-130 transportable.

The radar has a 240nm range operating at 2.8 megawatts in S-band (3 GHz) while consuming 53KW locally generated. They're talking here about improving coverage of such radars by use of Global Hawk and other high-endurance drones looking at the ground radars' (and AWACS radars') returns passively, over a long baseline.

The E-2 is the Northrop-Grumman Hawkeye carrier-borne AWACS.

[lentulusgracchus]

Does Vlad wear mom jeans?

He prefers "if you don't shut up I'm going to send a KGB goon to find your 'off' button" jeans.

[Tonytitan]

Basically what they're doing is using a Global Hawk as a radar repeater to increase the size of the footprint of the signal source, be that E-3, E-2 or whatever. Seeing as how these are battle management systems I hope that introducing another level of processing doesn't degrade the real time response and effectiveness of these systems.

I wonder what the operational history of the Global Hawk is in denied airspace. If they can operate with impunity in enemy skies this program is well worth pursuing.

[Paladin2]

Well, Bammy is certainly NOT going be known as the AWACS TOTUS.