SUBSIM Radio Room Forums - View Single Post - Active sonar, useful for anything other than basic ranging?

NFunky · 10-01-09, 11:19 AM

Just ran the same tests only I switched the platforms around so that I was driving the Iranian Kilo (the one with the nice green sonar displays) and the target was an LA FLT III. All other conditions were exactly the same.

The Kilo's sonar wasn't as weak as I expected. I was able to get a reliable visual return out to about 1.8 nm and a sporadic one out to about 2 nm. The biggest difference I found was that double pinging didn't make the contact any brighter at any range.

Oh, I forgot to mention in my last post that I always brought the display scale down to 10 for all tests and used single-ping mode. I haven't tried this test with any of the red displays and don't intend to since I have a hard time even seeing some passive sonar contacts with them (my vision again, green on black is much better contrast than red on black). I may do some more tests later with a bow aspect, a stern aspect and a semi-beam (45 degrees bow and stern) aspect, but not right now.

I find the short range of the active sonar's visual returns make it pretty useless for anything other than a knife fight type situation since even a Kilo would have a strong passive contact at these ranges. The audible return is still useful, as I mentioned above, for ranging of a target which is already pretty well localized.

10-01-09, 11:19 AM	#6
NFunky Machinist's Mate Join Date: Dec 2007 Posts: 127 Downloads: 3 Uploads: 0	Kilo active Just ran the same tests only I switched the platforms around so that I was driving the Iranian Kilo (the one with the nice green sonar displays) and the target was an LA FLT III. All other conditions were exactly the same. The Kilo's sonar wasn't as weak as I expected. I was able to get a reliable visual return out to about 1.8 nm and a sporadic one out to about 2 nm. The biggest difference I found was that double pinging didn't make the contact any brighter at any range. Oh, I forgot to mention in my last post that I always brought the display scale down to 10 for all tests and used single-ping mode. I haven't tried this test with any of the red displays and don't intend to since I have a hard time even seeing some passive sonar contacts with them (my vision again, green on black is much better contrast than red on black). I may do some more tests later with a bow aspect, a stern aspect and a semi-beam (45 degrees bow and stern) aspect, but not right now. I find the short range of the active sonar's visual returns make it pretty useless for anything other than a knife fight type situation since even a Kilo would have a strong passive contact at these ranges. The audible return is still useful, as I mentioned above, for ranging of a target which is already pretty well localized.