Raytheon flight tests EW prototype solution
Raytheon has conducted a demonstration of its prototype solution for the technology development phase of the US Navy’s Next Generation Jammer (NGJ) programme at the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in collaboration with the navy.
The system consisted of an active electronically scanned array (AESA), an all-digital, open, scalable receiver and techniques generator and a self-powered pod mounted on the underside of a Gulfstream business jet. The high power AESA front end and multichannel techniques generator are common building blocks not just for the US Navy's NGJ, but also for other airborne, maritime and ground-based Electronic Warfare (EW) systems.
Travis Slocumb, vice president of Electronic Warfare Systems, Raytheon's Space and Airborne Systems, said: ‘Eight months after award of the NGJ programme we successfully flew the integrated prototype system against representative threat radars. This demonstrates the capability and readiness of the core enabling technologies for the next generation of EW systems, and we did it on our first flight.’
Test data confirmed the successful jamming and disruption of air defence radars used to represent enemy threat radars. According to Raytheon, the combination of jamming techniques, beam agility, array-transmit power and jammer management were very effective against the threat systems and all test objectives were met or exceeded.
A primary goal of the flight test activity, based at Naval Air Station Point Mugu, was to reduce risk in the engineering, manufacturing and development (EMD) phase of the NGJ acquisition by the US Navy. While all the elements had been previously tested in a lab setting, this was the first time the end-to-end system had been powered by the air stream.
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