In article ,
George Ruch writes:
(Peter Stickney) wrote:

In article ,
George Ruch writes:
(B2431) wrote:

The article on the F-117 kill (http://www.aeronautics.ru/f117down.htm)
indicates that the kill was from two SA-6 missiles.

I've got to make a correction, here. The F-117 kill was made by an
SA-3 site.

I should have figured that. An SA-6 kill would have needed a lot of luck,
esp. once the guidance beam came on.

But... The inbound tracking was reportedly accomplished by a 1950's vintage
Soviet radar operating in the 165 - 190 cm range (158 - 181 MHZ). Useful
for ground-based early warning, but pretty much useless for fire control
purposes.

Which, BTW, is the normal EW/Air Search radar of the SA-3. Really old
missiles, like the SA-2 and SA-3 have, oddly enough, an advantage when
engaging stealth aircraft.

[much good info snipped]

I remember that setup from my old EW days. Add a decent LLTV/IR
combination and a decent crew and you'd have a very dangerous package.

Yery dangerous indeed. There are times when the unsophisticated
system is more effective than the new Gee-Whiz stuff. Of course,
system performance of something like an SA-3, SA-2, or Nike-Herc
depends a lot more on crew quality, (and quantity, it takes a lot of
people to run them), and they can get saturated a lot mroe easily.
But it can also take advantage of the pattern recognition wired into
the human brain. In the period leading up to Viet Nam, the Navy put a
lot of effort into deception jammers. (Repeaters & Track Breakers &
such). They consumed less power, and could be made smaller, so you
could fit 'em internally, and not sanitize a pylon carrying a pod. (A
big issue with the F-8 and early A-4s, 'casue they didn't have a lot
of pylons to begin with. And they worked pretty good against our best
systems. The only problem is, that when they were put up against the
the SA-2's Fan Song radars, after a while, they weren't quite as
effective. The manual operators were, with practice, often able to
pick out the true targets from the false ones. The Air Force went in
more for noise jammers, and these tended to work better in that
environment. If you fill the radar's screens with solid noise,
there's nothing to pick out.


--
Pete Stickney
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. -- Daniel Webster