Customer Reviews

EW 102: A Second Course in Electronic Warfare

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While Mr. Adamy may be an expert, apparently these books were thrown together a little quickly. Read the text and all will be well. Follow the example problems in the back and you're headed for a train wreck. When he works the problems they are frought with mistakes, big, blatant mistakes. For someone trying to learn EW the first time these are huge confidence deflators. Find an independent source to check your answers.

This book is the logically titled sequel to EW 101. The style is the same. Namely where very intricate and specialised maths and engineering is deprecated. What Adamy has done is reduce a problem down to the minimum physical model that conveys the essential information. This lets a reader, who might not be an engineer in the electronic warfare field, understand what the various measures and countermeasures are about.

To this ends, there are fascinating instances scattered throughout the text. One nice example concerns a target plane trying to evade a heat seeking missile. The plane releases a flare, that has more infrared energy than itself. The missile then follows the hotter signal and the plane escapes. One countermeasure is to have the missile's sensor measure and compare the energies at two wavelengths. With enough electronics, it can then discriminate between the flare and the cooler target plane, and track the latter. Of course, the engineering required to perform this is nontrivial and probably classified. But the basic physical picture is very simple.

Another useful feature of EW 102 is the appendix. This has answers to problems presented in EW 101. Plus to problems in EW 102. As far as I can ascertain, none of the problems require a computational device more complex than a calculator.

Mr. Dave Adamy's series, EW 101 and EW 102, are an outstanding collection for the practicing EW professional. Equations and drawings consisely describe the concepts and results from various EW disciplines; radar, communications and satellite are just a few areas that are covered. The second book expands greatly on the area of satellite communications - while not an area normally associated with electronic warfare, satellite communications provide the backbone for many countries social, political and military systems.

If there was one downside to this book it would be the price. While the information within is priceless to the EW wizards in industry, its a bit pricy for the blossoming EW student who has to bite the "over-$100" cost. Find it used if you can, or borrow from a technical library - then decide if it is worth the cost to you.