It’s very nice to produce a fancy Twitter post or an article for the Chinese Global Times to sell a product to Pakistan, Venezuela, and Iran when the buyer doesn’t know the engineering behind the VHF radar.
Anything Russia sells to China, China starts to reverse-engineer without asking about the combat value of copying this piece of machinery. When Chinese-made missiles, radars, tanks and drones fail in the hands of Pakistan, Venezuela, Nigeria, Thailand, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Cambodia, then China doubles down on propaganda in X, Facebook and Instagram.
You go to any engineering university and ask a second-year student of Electrical and Electronic Engineering why VHF radar resolution appears blurred on the operator’s screen?
Here’s the heart of the issue: VHF radars are excellent at detecting the presence of an aircraft, but they’re fundamentally poor at tracking them or providing fire‑control‑quality data. And the reasons are baked into physics and engineering, not operator skill or radar sophistication.
Let’s break it down cleanly and clearly. Why VHF Radars Struggle with Tracking and Fire Control.
Number 1: Long Wavelength make it Poor Angular Resolution
VHF radars operate at wavelengths of roughly 1–10 meters.
Angular resolution is proportional to:
\theta \approx \frac{\lambda }{D}
- \lambda : wavelength
- D: antenna aperture
Even with a massive antenna, the beam is wide rather than sharp.
Consequences
- The radar can tell “something is out there,” but not exactly where.
- Bearing accuracy is too coarse for guiding missiles.
- Tracking filters (Kalman, α‑β‑γ, etc.) struggle because the measurement uncertainty is huge.
This is the single biggest reason VHF radars can’t do fire control. Even an integrated VHF radar passing through a tiny field of view to a phased-array radar or fire-control radar makes it difficult to determine the target’s speed, altitude, and location.
Number 2: Huge Antennas makes Slow Beam Steering
To get any usable gain at VHF, antennas must be physically enormous, tens of meters across. Why this matters:
- Mechanical scanning is slow.
- Electronic scanning is extremely limited because phase shifters must handle meter‑scale wavelengths.
- Update rates are too low for high‑quality tracking of fast aircraft.
A fire‑control radar needs rapid, precise updates. VHF radars simply can’t provide that.
Number 3: Low Range Resolution
Range resolution depends on bandwidth:
\Delta R\approx \frac{c}{2B}
VHF radars have a narrow bandwidth, often only a few MHz.
Result
- Range resolution is on the order of tens to hundreds of meters.
- You cannot generate a precise range gate for a missile seeker.
- Multiple targets in formation blur together.
Fire control requires meter-level resolution, not football-field-level resolution. You can fire a surface-to-air missile at football-field-size resolution and expect a hit on the aircraft. It has to be precise targeting data passed to the seeker to determine the aircraft’s speed, altitude, and location to hit it. VHF does not know the aircraft’s exact location.
Number 4: High Clutter and Multipath
VHF wavelengths interact strongly with:
- Terrain
- Vegetation
- Buildings
- Atmospheric ducts
This produces:
- High clutter returns
- Ghost tracks
- Multipath fading
- Unstable track files
Tracking algorithms need stable, consistent measurements. VHF radars often provide the opposite.
Number 5: Low Doppler Resolution
Doppler resolution depends on coherent processing and bandwidth.
VHF radars:
- Have limited coherent processing intervals
- Have low PRFs
- Struggle with clutter cancellation
This makes it harder to:
- Separate aircraft from ground clutter
- Maintain velocity tracks
- Support missile guidance that requires precise closing‑velocity data
Number 6: Fire Control Requires Precision VHF Cannot Provide
A fire‑control radar must deliver:
- Precise angle (fractions of a degree)
- Precise range (meters)
- High update rate (multiple Hz)
- Low measurement noise
VHF radars deliver:
- Angle errors are measured in degrees
- Range errors are measured in tens to hundreds of meters
- Slow updates
- High noise
VHF radars are not simply built for the job. The VHF radar’s only function is to provide an early warning to ground crews, letting them know an aircraft or an object is approaching from a long distance, but where the aircraft is anyone’s guess!
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