AESA And Typhoon

It looks like Eurofighter is considering adding an AESA radar to the Typhoon that has mechanical scanning.

The neat trick here is that instead of simply strapping an AESA radar to the pitch and yaw actuators, they mount the radar at an angle, and then rotate the array to get a wider field of view.

About a year and a half ago, I posted about the Russians looking at something similar, though their idea used the existing actuators of a plane array radar.

I don't believe that in either case the actuators would respond as quickly as those on a more conventional radar, because the AESA is heavier than a slotted plate array antenna, but the electronic response of the AESA within a narrower band is literally hundreds of times faster than that.

Both would achieve the same thing, a very large field of view, though I think that Eurofighter's concept looks like it is much more amenable to reduction of head on radar cross section.

Mechanically, this is a lot simpler to do, though you need slip rings for both power and signal, and a rather complex fitting for cooling, as all current AESAs need liquid cooling.