Radar Jamming

Later, defense-industry scientists discovered that MESA was a crucial tool for electronic countermeasures, and they gave it its first real-time application. Radar jamming is a vital weapon in modern air warfare—if a warplane can detect and analyze the radar signals of another aircraft, a missile, or a ground installation, then it can defend itself by emitting signals that confuse or deceive the enemy’s listening radar receivers.

Initially, the challenge was to quickly tune in to the fixed frequencies of older radars, and then start jamming on those frequencies. However, as radars became more sophisticated and made increasing use of powerful computers, they became harder to tune in on: irregular noise was superimposed on the radar signals to cloak them, the signals were broken up into bursts too short for older jammers to analyze, and the frequencies used were varied rapidly and constantly, making it difficult for would-be jammers to detect a signal at all.

Radar scientists recognized that MESA techniques could solve these problems. MESA’s ability to filter out cyclical activity from background noise handled the cloaking transmissions; and its ability to find cyclical signals based on a very short data samples meant that it could both detect short bursts of radar, and cope with rapidly changing frequencies. So MESA’s methods were coupled with full-spectrum scanning and jamming transmitters to quickly lock in on and jam even the trickiest, most quickly varying radar signals.

The same features that led to MESA’s use in oil exploration and radar jamming, developed through the efforts of mathematicians, geophysicists, and radar scientists, are the ones that equip MESA so well to quickly filter cyclic components from incoming market price data, and respond with a potentially profitable prediction.

John Ehlers served in the U. S. Air Force in electronic countermeasures during the Korean War, which led him to obtain his bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees in the field of communication engineering and information theory. His continuing work in radar jamming research introduced him to MESA, and thanks to his curiosity and interest in trading, led to the application of MESA techniques to market analysis and to MESA Studies on Aspen Systems.

Topics:

MESA and Oil Exploration

MESA and Fourier Analysis

MESA and Market Analysis

Using MESA, by John Ehlers

Applying MESA Studies