Deception jamming does not simply hide a radar target in noise. It tries to make the radar believe something that is not true. Practical ECCM training therefore needs to show trainees how deception appears in radar data — and how it can be recognised.
Electronic-warfare training often begins with noise jamming. The principle is intuitive: additional energy interferes with the radar receiver and makes target detection more difficult.
Deception jamming presents a different problem.
Instead of merely degrading the radar signal, the jammer attempts to manipulate information used by the radar to determine where a target is, how fast it is moving or from which direction it is approaching.
For technical personnel, this raises a much more interesting question:
How can we recognise that the radar is being deceived?
Answering that question requires more than slides or an animation of a jammer. Trainees need access to radar signals and processing stages where they can observe the deception, analyse its effects and experiment with possible countermeasures.
This is the idea behind the SkyRadar ECCM training chain.
What is deception jamming?
A conventional radar transmits electromagnetic energy and analyses the returned signal to derive information about a target.
Among the fundamental observables are:
- Range — where is the target?
- Velocity — how fast is it moving relative to the radar?
- Angle — from which direction is the signal arriving?
A deception jammer attempts to manipulate one or more of these observables.
Rather than simply overwhelming the receiver with noise, it can create signals that resemble legitimate radar returns but contain deliberately misleading information.
Noise jamming attempts to reduce the radar's ability to see. Deception jamming attempts to make the radar see the wrong thing.
That distinction also changes the ECCM problem. Filtering unwanted energy may no longer be sufficient. The radar-processing chain has to identify behaviour that is inconsistent with a genuine target.
What is Range Gate Pull-Off (RGPO)?
Range Gate Pull-Off (RGPO) is a classic example of deception jamming.
The deceptive signal initially appears close to the genuine target return. Its delay is then progressively changed so that the false return appears to move away from the real target in range.
The objective is to make the radar's tracking process follow the deceptive return rather than the actual target.
For training purposes, however, the interesting part is not simply knowing the definition of RGPO. A trainee should be able to investigate questions such as:
- What changes in the received radar data?
- When does the deceptive response begin to separate from the genuine target?
- What happens to detection and tracking?
- Which characteristics could indicate that the apparent movement is inconsistent with a physical target?
This turns an abstract electronic-warfare concept into a signal-processing problem.
SkyRadar also provides a physical approach to this training problem. The SkyRadar Active Target allows controlled range-deception effects to be connected with measurements from a real radar.
What is the difference between RGPO, VGPO and AGPO?
The underlying idea of deception can be applied to different radar measurement dimensions.
| Technique | Radar quantity being attacked | Training question |
|---|---|---|
| RGPO — Range Gate Pull-Off | Range | Is the apparent target range consistent with the real target behaviour? |
| VGPO — Velocity Gate Pull-Off | Radial velocity / Doppler | Is the observed velocity evolution physically and temporally plausible? |
| AGPO — Angle Gate Pull-Off | Target angle | Is the apparent angular movement consistent with other target information? |
This distinction is particularly useful pedagogically because trainees can progress from relatively intuitive range deception towards more complex multidimensional deception.
The important question gradually changes from:
“Where is the false target?”
to:
“Which radar measurements can I still trust?”
How can deception jamming be detected?
There is no single universal filter that identifies every deceptive radar return.
Instead, detection can involve examining several characteristics of the received and processed information and looking for inconsistencies.
A trainee might investigate:
- signal amplitude and its evolution;
- range behaviour over successive observations;
- Doppler and velocity information;
- angle behaviour;
- detection thresholds;
- statistical characteristics;
- consistency between detections and tracks;
- sudden or implausible changes in target behaviour;
- differences produced by alternative processing strategies.
This is why practical ECCM training benefits from access to several stages of the radar-processing chain.
A student who sees only the final target symbol has relatively little information with which to understand why the radar was deceived.
A student who can inspect signals, detections, Doppler information and tracks can investigate the mechanism.
What role do CFAR and adaptive signal processing play?
Detection thresholds themselves are an important part of the problem.
A fixed threshold that performs well under one set of conditions may perform poorly when the interference environment changes.
CFAR — Constant False Alarm Rate — processing adapts the detection threshold according to characteristics of the surrounding signal environment. In an ECCM laboratory, this provides an opportunity to investigate how changing conditions influence detection behaviour.
Other processing techniques can be explored alongside it.
FreeScopes ECCM II supports statistical and adaptive processing exercises involving adaptive thresholding (CFAR), Savitzky-Golay filtering and median filtering.
These techniques serve different purposes. Savitzky-Golay filtering can smooth data while preserving important signal characteristics. Median filtering can be useful when investigating data affected by impulsive disturbances or outliers. CFAR addresses the detection threshold itself.
The educational objective is not to present any one method as a universal solution.
The trainee should be able to compare what different processing strategies do to the same disturbed radar data.
Why separate the EW attack from the trainee's ECCM processing?
This is an important architectural principle in the SkyRadar training environment.
SkySim generates the controlled EW scenario. FreeScopes provides the trainee's analysis and processing environment.
Consider a class of ten trainees.
The instructor can configure one VGPO scenario in SkySim ECCM II. Every trainee receives data representing the same controlled EW situation.
But they do not all have to perform the same analysis.
One trainee might concentrate on Doppler behaviour. Another can investigate detection thresholds. A third can compare filtering strategies, while another examines the relationship between detections and the resulting track.
The attack remains common and reproducible, while the analysis remains individual.
This creates an interesting classroom discussion afterwards:
Why did one processing chain recognise the disturbance earlier than another?
That question moves ECCM training beyond observing a predefined demonstration and towards engineering analysis.
What comes after RGPO?
Range deception provides a useful entry point because the underlying effect is relatively easy to visualise.
More advanced electronic-warfare training can then introduce additional dimensions and counter-countermeasures.
SkySim ECCM II can extend the scenario space towards:
- Angle Gate Pull-Off (AGPO);
- Velocity Gate Pull-Off (VGPO);
- waveform and receiver agility;
- PRI jitter and dwell control;
- pulse-compression diversity;
- sidelobe attack scenarios;
- antenna blanking and related countermeasure concepts.
The corresponding FreeScopes ECCM II environment allows trainees to analyse the resulting effects and compare processing and receiver strategies.
This progression matters.
ECCM should not be taught as a catalogue of acronyms. RGPO, VGPO, AGPO, waveform agility and sidelobe blanking become much easier to understand when trainees can observe what problem each technique is responding to.
Why are waveform and receiver agility relevant to ECCM?
A radar whose transmission and reception behaviour is completely predictable can make the adversary's task easier.
Changing selected radar parameters can therefore form part of an electronic-protection strategy.
Examples include variations in pulse repetition behaviour, dwell strategy and waveform characteristics.
In a training environment, trainees can compare how such changes affect a controlled deception scenario rather than simply learning that “agility improves ECCM”.
This leads to a more useful engineering question:
Which change makes the deception more difficult, and what does that change cost us elsewhere in radar performance?
That second part is important.
Radar engineering is rarely about maximising one parameter. Changes can affect detection performance, processing requirements, update behaviour and other characteristics of the system.
Good ECCM training therefore teaches trade-offs rather than recipes.
Why do sidelobe attacks create another ECCM problem?
An antenna does not receive energy exclusively through its main beam.
Real antenna patterns contain sidelobes. An adversarial signal entering through these sidelobes can therefore create a different class of interference and deception problem.
This connects electronic warfare directly with antenna engineering.
Trainees can move from asking:
“What does the signal processor see?”
to:
“How did that signal enter the receiver in the first place?”
Sidelobe attack and antenna-blanking exercises therefore provide a natural bridge between radar signal processing, antenna behaviour and ECCM.
What should an ECCM trainee actually learn?
The objective should not be to memorise that RGPO attacks range, VGPO attacks velocity and AGPO attacks angle.
A technically competent trainee should progressively learn to ask:
- What am I observing?
- Which part of the radar chain produced this information?
- Could this behaviour originate from a real target?
- Which other measurement could confirm or contradict it?
- What happens if I change the processing strategy?
- Does my countermeasure improve robustness without creating an unacceptable disadvantage elsewhere?
These are engineering questions rather than definitions.
And they require experimentation.
How do you build a hands-on ECCM training chain?
A practical electronic-warfare laboratory can build competence progressively:
Real radar echo → controlled disturbance → deception → detection → analysis → ECCM processing → comparison of countermeasures
The training can start with physical measurements from the NextGen 8 GHz Pulse Radar, introduce controlled deception using the SkyRadar Active Target, extend the scenario space through SkySim ECCM I and II, and allow each trainee to investigate the results independently using FreeScopes ECCM I and II.
Simulation and physical experimentation complement each other. Real RF measurements show trainees what the effects look like after transmission and reception, while simulation provides controlled, repeatable scenarios that can be varied systematically.
Where does AI fit into electronic-warfare training?
AI can add another layer to this learning chain.
Instead of defining every indicator manually, trainees can investigate whether data-driven methods can learn to distinguish normal radar behaviour from disturbed or deceptive situations.
But the foundation remains the same.
Before asking an AI system to recognise deception, the radar engineer should understand what deception looks like in the data — and why.
This connects classical radar engineering, electronic warfare, ECCM and AI without treating them as isolated subjects.
In our article “From a Real Radar Echo to AI: Building a Hands-On Electronic Warfare Learning Chain”, we describe this wider progression from physical radar measurements through controlled deception and ECCM towards AI-based radar perception.
From observing jamming to understanding deception
The fundamental training challenge changes as electronic warfare becomes more sophisticated.
With noise jamming, the trainee asks how interference affects detection.
With RGPO, the trainee asks whether apparent range can still be trusted.
With VGPO and AGPO, velocity and angle also become part of the deception problem.
With waveform agility, adaptive processing and antenna-level countermeasures, the trainee begins to investigate how the radar itself can respond.
The result is a very different form of EW education.
Instead of learning a list of attacks and countermeasures, trainees work through the underlying engineering problem:
Observe the radar data. Identify what changed. Understand why it changed. Decide whether the information can be trusted. Then investigate what the radar can do about it.
That is the transition from demonstrating electronic warfare to teaching ECCM.
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