Raytheon has successfully tested a prototype of the US Navy’s next-generation jammer (NGJ) pod against simulated enemy radar threats over a naval base in California.
The flight test was the first time the demonstrator pod has flown as part of an “end to end, integrated electronic attack system” including an active electronically scanned array (AESA), a digital, open-architecture, scalable receiver and techniques generator. It was mounted to the belly of a Gulfstream GIII business jet for the tests performed at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake.
NGJ is an effort to replace the analog ALQ-99 tactical jamming system carried by the Boeing E/A-18G Growler electronic attack aircraft with a digital electronically scanned radar jammer.
"Eight months after award of the NGJ program we successfully flew the integrated prototype system against representative threat radars," Travis Slocumb, vice-president of electronic warfare systems at Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems, says in a statement.
"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."
Raytheon is the sole participant in the engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) phase of the NGJ competition.
The October test was designed to reduce risk associated with that phase of the programme, Raytheon says. The system had previously been tested in a laboratory setting, but this flight test was the first time it was flown aboard an aircraft and powered by the air stream captured by intakes on either side of the jamming pod.
A team of Raytheon engineers collected data during the flight confirming that the system can jam and disrupt simulated enemy air defense radar, the company says. Which enemy radar bands were disrupted is not known, but the Navy has for years expressed the need for an upgraded mid-band jammer, which is what a large number of existing threats use.
“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,” Raytheon says.
[UPDATE: Article was updated to clarify that the pod is a prototype version.]
Source: FlightGlobal.com
