yes indeed the link proves the jammer is cleared for export and Aussies will get the Growler. yes ALARM is a British missile but Rafale doesn't fire it. Mayavi will be ready by 2010 ready to go board the F-35 and our LCA. ALARM uses passive radar seekers and not INS and has loiter ability.
ATK - Successful AARGM firing (ATK)
speaking of moving targets the SH can deploy better weapons also capable of hitting moving targets SDB, LJDAM, SLAM, SLAM-ER, JSOW. Rafale has none of these weapons has the lowest amount of weapons flexibility compared to the Gripen NG, F-16IN, EF and F-18IN. Even with Growler lite using a couple of new AL-99Q jammers the SH will prtty much make the Rafale a sitting duck. The older jammer's jam radius is over 120km, the newer one is bound to be even more effective and its jam radius is higher than our very own ground based Samyukta.
The most obvious area where this lack of vision is displayed is in the Rafale's overall layout and its notable lack of signature reduction design features. The Rafale exhibits numerous features that would simply never be incorporated into any design intended to have a reduced RCS, including its prominent intakes, a huge vertical stabilizer, canards, a non-retractable refueling probe, and numerous other probes, protrusions, and other serious RCS offenders. What does this mean? Late in the Rafale's design process its engineers realized that they had failed to anticipate the key role RCS reduction would play in future designs and scambled to find ways to reduce the Rafale's RCS. With minimal experience with RCS reduction and an airframe that was already too far along in its design to be fixed, the end result was of course disappointing. Shaping is the single most important consideration in RCS reduction and the Rafale has too many major flaws to ever be considered stealthy. RAM coatings and last minute saw-tooth edge features are at best minimally effective on an aircraft that is otherwise designed all wrong from the start. Hence i always question the claim of it being as stealthy as many claim it to be. Even the SH has a lot cleaner forward stealth aspect.
Finally, one of the most critcal flaws in the Rafale's design is its widely misunderstood "Spectra" self protection jammer and RWR suite. As was done with the F-16 and Super Hornet, the Rafale design team sought to incorporate an internal self protection jammer into the Rafale to improve its survivability against radar guided threats. The major failure of Spectra was that its development cycle was far far too long and France's semiconductor and computer industry was simply incapable of providing the necessary components to create a truly cutting edge system. By the time it went from the drawing board to production, a period of over 10 years, it was barely able to match systems being offered by Israel and the United States on other 4th generation fighters. The Spectra self protection jammer simply lacks the processing power, flexibility, and diverse threat response range available on aircraft like the Super Hornet, F-16 block 60, or modern Israeli systems.
Instead, what Spectra offers are relatively simplistic signals generated by its prominent but inflexible and simplistic transmitters.(Based on narrow-band, inefficient MMICs, a constraint imposed by the lack of a domestic supplier for more modern MMICs, the same issue that has plauged France's AESA program.) Spectra is perhaps the least crippling of the Rafale's flaws, because it could potentially be removed and replaced with a more modern system. Spectra tacks up a relatively large amount of space and power for what it offers, so a modern design could certainly do more with the same space and power supply.
A Flanker can detect the Rafale at over 200km . This is not what I call "discreet".