Cross-eye jamming – Correcting Misconceptions

Cross-eye jamming is an old idea with two patents covering it being filed in 1958 and almost every electronic warfare (EW) textbook mentioning it.  Despite this long history, no operational system that uses cross-eye jamming has ever been publicly disclosed.  However, there has been a resurgence of interest in cross-eye jamming since the turn of the century which was triggered by the experimental work disclosed by Falk, Neri, and their colleagues.  This resurgence of interest has been sustained by new theoretical and experimental results that suggest cross-eye jamming is both more capable and easier to implement than previously believed.  This presentation aims to both explain cross-eye jamming and its significance, and to provide a review of the implications of this new research on the topic.

The concepts underpinning cross-eye jamming are notoriously difficult to understand, especially for non-technical audiences, so the presentation will provide a number of explanations of how cross-eye jamming works, including both the traditional phase-front analysis and other analyses.  The significance of theoretical analyses of cross-eye jamming will be explored to highlight new conclusions and the opportunities they offer for future research.  Finally, experimental studies will be summarised to illustrate how implementing cross-eye jamming has moved from being considered completely impractical to the point where students can construct laboratory cross-eye jammers using low-cost hardware.

The nature of the topic means that different versions of this presentation are available depending on the technical expertise of the audience.  At one extreme, the presentation can be structured to emphasise high-level understanding by a non-technical audience through the use of animations and images, while at the other extreme detailed mathematical analyses can be presented to audiences with extensive technical expertise.