China is suspected of developing a new type of early warning aircraft, and there are rumors that the Air Police-3000 and Air Police-700 will be available soon. The reason for the rumors is that a commercial satellite has photographed a ground test bench suspected to be a new AWACS radar.
Three AWACS radars were installed on the test bench, and the patterns of these radomes showed potential information. This change in pattern is due to the fact that the shell material of the radar is different.
The Air Police-500 and Air Police-2000 adopt a three-sided active phased array radar layout, which is capable of 360-degree target detection. In contrast, the U.S. military's E-2D early warning aircraft uses a single-sided active phased array radar design
Therefore, there is a problem that the information refresh rate is linked to the rotation frequency of the radar antenna during omnidirectional scanning. The Air Police-3000 and Air Police-700, which China is about to develop, may adopt a more advanced double-sided array radar design.
Double-sided array radar is slightly insufficient in space utilization, but has obvious advantages in radar antenna size. With the advancement of technology, the performance advantages of double-sided array radar are becoming more and more obvious, and it is expected to become the mainstream development direction of early warning radar. Although the relevant information is limited,
However, this possibility is very high, because the current digital array radar already has a fairly high degree of integration, which is sufficient to meet a variety of combat uses, and it is somewhat unnecessary to continue to engage in single-sided array radars on land-based early warning aircraft.