By
Leesha Furse
PROVIDING
aircrew with high confidence levels in laser warning systems is
one of the main long-term aims of a recent series of successful
air, land and sea experiments. The trials tested ADF and international
laser threat systems against a variety of laser warning sensors
mounted on board a C-130H aircraft and a landing craft heavy.
Dr Olivia Samardzic, of the Defence Science and Technology Organisation,
said the data would lead to more informed decisions about which
systems to buy in the future and what improvements could be made
to the ADF’s current capability.
“In
the past we’ve bought different missile approach and laser warning
systems without ever having the chance really evaluate them and
we’ve always done the fix-up work afterwards. For once, we have
been able to do some evaluation prior to there being a large investment,
especially for the Air Force,” Dr Samardzic said.
“What
makes a good threat warning system has always been thought to
be the ability to declare a missile or laser threat but, in reality,
it is not only whether the system declares the threat but also
what the system’s false alarm rate is.”
The
air experiment involved ground and aircrew from No. 36 Squadron
and ALSPO at RAAF Base Richmond and operational support officers
from the Joint Electronic Warfare Operational Support Unit (JEWOSU)
at RAAF Base Edinburgh.
The US, Canada and UK were also involved in the experiment along
with DSTO’s Electronic Warfare and Radar Division and Scientific and Engineering services and Army’s 16 Air Defence Regiment.
The
experiments began at Port Wakefield in South Australia, before
sorties over the east coast of Australia through Canberra, Sydney,
Wollongong and Brisbane. The aircraft tests were carried out from
June 15-19.
“We
used the long-range laser threat emulator, which was developed
collaboratively between DSTO and Tenix Defence Systems, that emulates
laser beam riders and laser target designators and laser range
finders so you can use it to dial up characteristics of different
systems and it will produce a beam that looks like one of those
threats,” Dr Samardzic said.
“It
was the first time we used the system to test against a moving
platform. Obviously if you’ve got an aircraft in flight it’s
hard to track, so we were testing if it could actually hit the
aircraft with the threat emulator. It went quite well. We were
[also] trying to make sure that the warning receivers that were
on the aircraft were able to detect those threats.”
The
trial was to have tested some foreign and ADF counter-measures
but equipment failure delayed these tests. “The sorts of effects
we were looking for [from the sensors] were the potential false
alarms sources of different forms of lighting, such as street
lighting and strobe lighting. We were also looking at the glint
off the ocean. We looked at industrial sites and in dense urban
environments such as those found around large cities,” Dr Samardzic
said.
DSTO
plans further work testing the DSTO-developed countermeasure system
on its own laser range along with further studies into improving
the angular accuracy and sensitivity of laser warning receivers.
