EW Environmental Generation Engineering: Part 1 — An Overview

Webinar Overview 

Simulating an electromagnetic environment relevant for testing electronic warfare devices is a challenging engineering problem that is full of trade-offs and design complexity. This multi-part presentation series will walk the audience through common engineering challenges and design considerations to help the test engineer become more knowledgeable about the complexities of creating an EW environment. The next generation of EW devices and platforms introduces new difficulties: modern threats are becoming faster, more agile, and more complex. Accordingly, the testing challenges for our friendly devices scale with these modern threat enhancements. This presentation series is designed to frame those problems and enable the test engineer to consider multiple possible solutions, understand the engineering design trade-offs of each one, and more intelligently tackle these environmental generation test challenges in the future.

This short presentation introduces the user to the basics of EW environmental generation and considerations for setting up and configuring a simulation of the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS). With straightforward examples and smaller-scale problem spaces and diagrams, the audience will be able to conceptualize the problem space, paving the way for more complex engineering challenges in later portions of the EW series. This presentation will assist the audience in framing the problem space by answering key questions: Why are we simulating? What do we need to simulate? And what should we consider when planning our simulation test system? Additionally, this presentation will define some crucial test terms and their significance to a test engineer.