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Stephen Chen

In a naval combat simulation conducted by Chinese researchers, an anti-ship missile targets a fleet of eight People’s Liberation Army warships showing on its radar.
But it is not an armada – it is just a single vessel.
Four electronic warfare devices circling the ship created the illusion, sending signals that could deceive even an advanced radar from a distance.
It was developed by a team from the Beijing Research Institute of Telemetry, an aerospace defence contractor.
They detailed the “unprecedented” technology in a peer-reviewed paper published in the Chinese-language Journal of Systems Engineering and Electronics on February 28.
Their study suggested that networked 1-bit jammers could be used to trick enemy missiles into pursuing “ghost” fleets while the real warships avoided the radar entirely.
These jammers – which transmit a single signal to disrupt enemy radar systems – cost a fraction of the traditional systems.
The team said there was more to be done, including combining the jammer with artificial intelligence and other new technology to improve its performance.
“These efforts will ensure our absolute advantage in electronic warfare,” wrote the team led by researcher Hu Jijun.

They said traditional radar decoys struggled to mimic the complex electromagnetic signatures of modern warships and the extensive deployment needed was cost-prohibitive and “operationally cumbersome”.
“The effectiveness of radar decoys remains heavily contingent on their fidelity in mimicking target signatures and design adaptability,” the scientists said.
“Once deployed, these decoys exhibit fixed operational parameters – their simulated profiles remain static, rendering them ill-suited for dynamic battlefield conditions.”
The key for the Beijing team was replacing expensive analogue-to-digital processors with analogue converters.
Each jammer uses a comparator chip to convert intercepted radar pulses into 1-bit signals – recording only whether incoming waves cross a dynamically shifting voltage threshold.
This crude simplification, counterintuitively, allows the devices to generate some of the most realistic interference patterns that can evolve in real time.
According to the paper, when four such units coordinate via tailor-made algorithms they create radar phantoms that could cover an entire battlefield.
“Through precision modulation of the jammer array, we engineer reality-decoupled phantom scenarios – constructing hyper-realistic deceptive interference coverage out of the blue across actual combat zones,” the researchers wrote.
“This paradigm fundamentally enhances the tactical agility and combat efficacy of electronic warfare systems by enabling electromagnetic environment sculpting beyond physical truth constraints.”
They said creating and maintaining harmony in the signals was key to creating the illusion. By tuning threshold voltages at specific frequencies, the jammers exploit nonlinear interactions between simplified radar returns and enemy emissions.
The resulting interference mimics not just targets but entire electromagnetic ecosystems, according to the researchers.
But they cautioned that their results were derived from controlled digital simulations and not live tests involving real missiles. They also conceded that the simplified 1-bit system could have exploitable vulnerabilities, and noted that if missiles were networked it would be more difficult to trick them.


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China is working on a jammer to send missiles after ‘ghost’ fleet of warships

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A phantom fleet appeared during the simulation. Image: Beijing Research Institute of Telemetry

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Beijing team says it could give PLA ‘absolute advantage’ in electronic warfare when combined with AI and other new technology


Beijing team says it could give PLA ‘absolute advantage’ in electronic warfare when combined with AI and other new technology.
