On the topic of AESA radars:
PESA radars(N011M BARS, for example) are like that mechanical radar light being traversed in an AESA radar pattern.
If anyone is interested in the reason why AESA or PESA radars are able to actually move their search pattern so fast:
When this pebble falls into the pond, a wave is generated.
Assume the wave is the radar output. In fighter aircraft, we gotta steer this thing, so that we can detect airframes. How to do it?
The first method is swinging the transmitting/receiving element around. That's the mechanical radar search pattern.
What if we steered the radar electronically? Surely it would be faster than the mechanical method -- and best of all, we don't even have to swing the radar around physically, we'll let physics do the work for us.
Who remembers the vector and oscillation chapters from the NCERT book in 11th?
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"Phase" or "phase angle" here is just the timing of the transmission of signals, relatively to each other. 0° would mean that the signal was launched at the first time. 22° would mean it was launched with a little delay, 45° with even more delay, and so on, until your transmitted wave pattern beam becomes directional, and thus with changing phases, you are able to "steer" it.
Congratulations, we've just made a PESA radar. The gifs I have included are just simulations, insanely slowed down. Now imagine what happens with a computer that can compute each cycle at 1/10000th of a second, you get to that disco pattern..
For the one we have in our Su-30MKI, it can do about 700 million operations per second.
Now imagine what our guys at LRDE achieved, for the IAF to say they want the Uttam over the Bars lmao.