Originally Posted by
VIProds
None that I know of Tonytech2. What with Filingdales in Yorkshire, Greenland & the"Dew Line" we had them tagged well before they got near & would send up a welcoming party.
You are mixing systems. Fylingdales and Thule were a 1960s anti-missile system whereas DEW or Distant Early Warning was against a bomber threat. In UK the GCI and later Bloodhound systems performed the same function.
The early threat was from photo reconnaisance, the same as the RB45 flights. The Soviet method was, as I said, to use deviating airliners. Now of course BEA would never have done that, would they?
The only time that I know of is when the USAF & the RAF had joint execises. We sent three Vulcans over the North pole & three other Vulcans approached down the East Coast of the States. They all had Electronic Counter Measures activated & were undetected much to the consternation of the Chiefs of Staff !
The Vulcans actually flew out of Goose Bay, IIRC, as they certainly did not have the range to attack over the pole. They were not so much undetected as they achieved hard kills against the radar stations I was told. The radars were designed for maximum sensitivity and had no protection circuits to cope with the power output of the carcinotron jammers. Effectively not jammed but burnt out. I suspect the penetration was actually against the mid-Canada Line and not the DEW line.
The backward wave oscillators were demonstrated in 1951, M-type by Bernard Epsztein, (French patent 1,035,379; British patent 699,893; US patent 2,880,355) and O-type by Rudolf Kompfner. The M-type BWO is a voltage-controlled non-resonant extrapolation of magnetron interaction, both types are tunable over a wide range of frequencies by varying the accelerating voltage. They can be swept through the band fast enough to be appearing to radiate over all the band at once, which makes them suitable for effective radar jamming, quickly tuning into the radar frequency. Carcinotrons allowed airborne radar jammers to be highly effective. However, frequency-agile radars can hop frequencies fast enough to force the jammer to use barrage jamming, diluting its output power over a wide band and significantly impairing its efficiency.