hi folks over the last year or so radar systems in War Thunder have gotten a lot more advanced and a bit more complicated in this guide I'm going to show you everything about radar sets in the game how to read the stat card what all the terminology means how to read the displays all the weird radar modes obscure functionality and the keybinds all of it first a Shameless plug to like And subscribe if you find this guide useful plus the channel has a ton of playlists and other videos you might like Anyway there are a lot of caveats to what I'm going to present here and there are a lot of variations between radar sets in the game plus some radar sets are just better than others so if you run into inconsistent Behavior just try to keep that in mind oh and I put timestamps on the video in case you need to come back for a quick reference on some specific radar mode or something like that to start off we're going to look at some radar stat cards and explain how to read them you can view a radar stat card by hovering over your plane's radar in the X-ray view out in the hanger model just tells you the name of the radar set type tells you what kind of sensor unit it is a conventional radar set is just labeled as radar and then we have a search only radar a radar Rangefinder an advanced radar plus irst unit or a tracking only radar the vast majority of of radar sets in the game are labeled as just plain radar and that's what most of the video is going to focus on units with IRS T mentioned also include an infrared search and track in addition to the radar and no planes in the game yet have irsst without conventional radar search only radar are sets that scan for targets but can't lock anything radar rangefinders are locked in ACM mode without search functions and give you a fairly accurate range to Target when something flies in front of it track radar is the most uncommon type and it can lock targets out in front of them with a full radar lock generally using ACM mode but they don't have any search functionality now let's look at a bigger sample of stat cards and what all the terms mean band tells you what frequency band the radar uses I'll be going over those in a minute range is unsurprisingly how far the radar can detect targets keep in mind that this is an optimistic estimate under ideal conditions and practical range is usually much lower search Zone tells you how much of the sky the radar can see in its sweep pattern some Radars can change this and I'll be going over those in a minute too below that we have an itemized list of advanced features and modes that the radar unit supports I've got sections coming up going over all the advanced modes individually but a couple couple of these are pretty basic so we can go over them here now SAR H just means that the radar can guide a semi-active radar homing missile iff is identify Friend or Foe and means that the radar tries to prevent you from locking up friendly targets or at least it shows you on the scope which targets are friendly in actual gameplay this is not super reliable so just keep that in mind the look down section if there is one will list the various pulse Doppler or MTI modes that the radar has in order to deal with ground clutter I'll be going over those later as well look up means that the radar has regular SRC search mode without any ground clutter filtering this is generally only itemized on radar sets with look down modes and look up modes and not all pulse Doppler Radars have a regular lookup search mode DL targets just shows you the maximum number of missiles that the radar can send data link updates to at the same time now let's look at radar Scopes and make sense of these displays War Thunder has three different types of radar displays while other radar Scopes do exist such as the a scope J scope and so on none of them are present in the game first is the PPI the plan position indicator this is the familiar slice of pie looking radar scope and it visualizes a top down view of the radar picture out in front of the aircraft relative to the nose of the aircraft this is the default radar scope in War Thunder next up is the B scope this is also a top down view of the radar picture but it distorts the info a little bit to fit into a rectangle kind of like a globe of the earth gets morphed a little for presenting it as a flat map if you want to use the B scope you have to turn it on pretty deep in your set settings you have to go into preferences Air Battle settings and then toggle use rectangular radar indicator which is defaulted to Off Third is the ccope this presents a first-person view looking out in front of the aircraft from the point of view of the radar dish in the game a few early radar sets provide this in addition to the PPI or B scope and it's also used for infrared search and track systems radar contact are indicated with a DOT or a dash and the current scanning direction is also indicated with a slightly different dot okay so let's talk about how to read a radar display and make sense of all these numbers and stuff this info is presented in slightly different locations on the different radar Scopes and here you can see six Scopes showing basically the same information on the bope and the PPI we're just going over the basics here the line that's moving left to right shows where your radar beam is currently searching and the dots represent things that your radar sees usually called radar contacts your radar contacts are going to show up differently depending on if it's a general contact if it's selected if it's a locked Target or if it's a friendly contact a selected contact will get two vertical lines as brackets out on the side sometimes it can be a little hard to see if your radar scope is cluttered up with too many things a locked Target will show up as a circle or a DOT depending on your scope and most radar sets will show you a dotted line to the Target that you currently have locked more advanced radar sets will also show you a little line coming out of the dot showing the direction that the locked Target is moving the icon with the four bars indicates the amount of interference from ground clutter that your radar is currently experiencing the green smearing effect on the scope is the actual radar clutter these numbers on the side indicate the current vertical elevation of your radar dish these numbers indicate the current scan angle in degrees you can cycle through your Radars available presets if it has any with the change radar irst search mode keybind this number shows the current range scale on your scope and you can cycle through your Radar's available presets if it has any using the change radar irst scope scale keybind your radar mode will be shown here you can cycle through radar modes with change radar irst mode each radar mode has its own abbreviation and sometimes multiple sets of letters will appear showing you that for example your radar is in search pulse Doppler head-on mode or pulse Doppler raid assessment mode each of these modes has its own section later in this video there are additional elements displayed on some Scopes like Missile Range indicators and detection dead zones and all that but I'll be going over those later in the relevant sections now let's look at radar frequency bands here you can see the Scopes of each radar band present in fixed wi aircraft in War Thunder mainly a b c f i and J Bands some helicopters have a k band radar but currently no fixed wi aircraft do and the vast majority of radar sets in War Thunder are iband the simplest way to explain radar bands is that higher frequency Radars are going to be more accurate and you can see this on the scope on the lower band sets the radar contact is a big horizontal line that goes almost all the way across the radar scope on higher band sets it's closer to just being a little square dot now it's also worth mentioning that not all radar warning receivers can detect all signal banss for more info about that you should check out my complete guide to radar warning receivers Link in the description and a pinned comment next we're going to start looking at the different types of radar in the game and explaining new features and advanced modes as we go along starting off with the basic World War II sets and moving up to more modern systems the first type of radar you're likely to encounter are dipole search Radars mounted on some World War II aircraft unlike later sets these Radars don't use addition beam or anything like that they have an antenna array that projects a fixed static field of radar energy out in front of the aircraft and listens for Signal returns there's no scanning beam moving across the scope and the advantage of these sets is that the radar picture is updated basically in real time all at once there are several disadvantages however and they're big ones first first dipole units are horribly vulnerable to ground clutter as you can see on the scope in the footage with this H 219 in order to avoid ground clutter you typically need to climb up to an altitude above the range setting on the scope and the scope range can't be changed also all of these sets are very low band so contacts are going to show up as large bars instead of little dots which makes accurate directional tracking a bit more difficult now in a practical sense these aren't super useful in most of War Thunder's game modes but they can occasionally still be relevant flying out above a ground battle or in simulator mode next we're going to look at radar rangefinders these units are generally from early generation jet fighters but a few modern ones have them as well and out in the real world they're mostly used to help aim gyroscopic guns sites in the game they don't really do a lot for you for the most part they're locked in ACM targeting mode which I'll cover in more detail later and they'll lock the first thing that flies in front of them once a Target is found all you get is generally a range Target indicated on the scope this can be situationally useful in some game modes that don't have Target spotting but otherwise it's not really giving you any info that you didn't already have as a special note radar Rangefinder locks can be used to slave an infrared missile Seeker if the missile supports that function now to actually read the display you get a fairly standard B scope or PPI just with a very narrow static angle the mode is generally going to read acq for trying to acquire a Target or trk when a Target is tracked you'll get a horizontal line showing the radar contact when a Target is tracked some Advanced units can adjust the scope range but most can't now we get to Conventional radar sets I'm not going to be going into a lot of detail about search only or track only because their display and interface are identical to what I'm going to be showing you here they're just missing either the ability to lock targets or search scanning respectively conventional radar sets use either a dish or phased array to scan a small bit of the sky with a radar beam and then they move the beam around to get a picture of large parts of the sky you can see this here in this Jets r radar in search mode the scanning beam is in a grid pattern top to bottom side to side this is how radar and search mode behaves and the actual area it scans is going to depend on your Radar's search Zone setting if your radar has more than one there will be an asterisk next to it on the search angles on your radar scope and you can change the setting with your change radar irst search mode keybind your current radar beam direction is visualized in game by green lines that move out in front of your plane in the external view you'll see one moving left to right and one moving up and down on the right hand side if you change your scanning asz a myth of your radar you'll see these change and it can help visualize the area of the sky that your radar is actually scanning instead of just trying to guess based on the degrees listed on your scope some radar sets support a setting that allows you to control your radar elevation relative to the Horizon instead of to your plane if you go into your options and Air Battle settings and disable constant elevation of radar antenna your radar will align itself to the Horizon instead of the direction your plane's nose is facing there are limits of course and once you point too far up or down it's going to track off and not all radar sets support this feature but it can still be situationally useful and some players prefer it especially if you focus mostly on Treetop level air combat some radar sets have functionality for you to manually adjust the search zone of your radar in effect letting you manually aim your radar dishes search pattern to adjust the horizontal search area you need to set your key binds for horizontal radar irst Target Q control axis these will allow you to manually control the azimeth of your horizontal search area assuming that your radar supports that function to adjust the vertical search area things are a little bit more involved you first have to turn off constant elevation of radar antenna which is that feature we looked at a moment ago that makes your radar search area Follow The Horizon once that is off you can manually adjust to the search area vertically with your keybinds for radar irst tilt control axis these features work for radar and irst and are only available in more advanced aircraft unfort fortunately it's not itemized or labeled in any way on the stat card so you just have to try your plane out and see if it works next we're going to look at locking a radar Target and why you might want to there are three methods of locking a radar Target bvr targeting ACM targeting and HMS targeting these are itemized on the radar stat cards and the controls are entirely different also important is to know that some Radars can only lock Targets in a specific zone out in front of of the radar dish this is most common on some more entry-level radar sets or on radar sets with a very long scanning range now on the scope for these Radars you'll see one area shaded in a darker green than the rest of the scope that's the tracking Zone you won't be able to lock a Target unless it's inside of the tracking Zone and if it moves outside of that zone you'll lose your lock we're going to start with bvr targeting the idea is to select a Target on your radar scope and then Focus your radar on it now there are two methods of Target selection using bvr targeting cylic targeting and manual queuing we'll first look at cyclic targeting in order to enable cyclic targeting go into your options panel and take the switch for targets cyclic switching of aircraft radar and set it to yes on your radar scope a selected contact will now have that little vertical bracket on it you can now change which contact is selected with your keybind for select radar irst Target to lock which will just cycle through them then once you have a contact selected hit your keybind for lock radar irst On Target the radar mode will then change to acq for acquiring Target and you'll get a little green bracket that flashes briefly out in front of you in the direction of your target this is the radar Target frame and it visualizes the area that your radar is trying to look and lock the Target that you have selected if it locks your radar will switch modes to trk to indicate that it's successfully tracking a Target next is manual radar queuing this is a little more complicated and the controls can be kind of cumbersome if you don't have a fairly elaborate control setup manual queuing allows you to move the targeting bracket around on your scope manually to do this turn off the option for targets cyclic switching of aircraft radar in your options panel then set your key binds for horizontal and vertical radar irst Target Q control axis this will allow you to move the targeting bracket around on the scope in order to lock a Target you move the brackets over the radar contact that you want then hit your keybind for lock radar irst On Target which will trigger the AC C mode and show you the targeting frame as normal if you successfully lock a Target your radar will switch to trk mode and you'll get the green box out around the target the next method of targeting is ACM mode which stands for air combat maneuvering mode this targeting method simply locks your radar fixed facing directly forward and it tries to lock the first thing it sees to activate this hit your keybind for radar irst Beyond within visual range combat this will switch your radar mode to ACM and you'll get the radar frame blinking out in front of you the radar will now try to lock the first and closest Target to fly into the radar frame but keep in mind that ACM mode is intended for close range combat and it generally has a much shorter range than bvr targeting some Advanced radar sets also allow you to use multiple ACM targeting frames the default for most radar sets is just a small square out in front of you but more advanced sets can toggle between a larger square and sometimes a tall rectangle intended for turn fights to cycle through targeting frames first put your radar in ACM mode then hit your keybind for change radar irst search mode to cycle through any additional targeting frames that your radar supports the last method of locking a Target is with a helmet mounted sight itemized as HMS mode on the radar stat card it's exactly what it sounds like your plane's computer points your radar dish or irst Seeker in the direction your head is facing you activate this by hitting the keybind for radar irst Beyond within visual range combat just like you were going into ACM mode then you hit it a second time which will cycle into HMS when the HMS is active you'll get four dots showing where your sensor is pointed and you can aim it with your camera view or with your head if you're using a VR headset then you just hit the key bind for lock radar irst On Target you'll see the dots blink into the targeting radar frame for a moment and hopefully it'll lock your target make sure to check the range on your scope before you try to lock something in HMS as generally it's got a much shorter range than bvr targeting once you have a Target locked a number of things happen your radar will shift into TR K mode and it'll focus on just the target you have locked you'll also get a green square out around the locked Target and some additional information about it you'll get a very accurate distance measurement near the top right of the square and a relative speed indication on the bottom right a positive number means that you're getting closer to the Target at that rate of speed while a negative number means that they're pulling away from you on most radar sets you also get a Target movement indicator below the targeting frame it's a little green circle with a line showing the target's direction of movement if your radar is Advanced enough you'll also get this on your radar scope your locked Target will show up as a little circle and it'll have a line in it showing the direction of travel if you have air-to-air missiles many radar sets will also give you a range indication on your radar scope showing the effective range of the missile that you currently have selected against the target you currently have locked depending on how advanced your radar set is it can show you any one of three different indications which you can see on this graphic the farthest line out is the maximum range of your missile against the currently locked Target keep in mind this is an estimate based on the speed and direction of the Target and if it turns away from you or something the max range can change very quickly on the PPI this is just a horizontal line whereas on the B scope it's a short horizontal line on the right hand side of the scope with the longer line showing the current range of your target the next line shows the mar the minimum abort range of the target I'll be going over that in more detail in my complete guide to air-to-air missiles but in short the mar is the range at which the opponent won't be able to outrun your missile just by turning away from you on the B scope this is shown as a vertical bracket on the right hand side of the scope if there is a third line towards the bottom of your scope it's showing you the minimum range of your missile this is generally very short and you might not even see it depending on the scope's Range setting please keep in mind that not all radar sets will show you all of these different range indications and nothing is 100% accurate these ranges are all just estimates now we're going to look at how to understand data links and missile track indications some more advanced radar sets will display some information about data links and missiles in white down on the radar scope targets that have a missile fired at them will be displayed with a thin line intersecting them from the bottom targets being actively tracked with a valid data link to a missile will be shown as a large bright Circle and the B scope will put a small vertical line above them you also get a little dot showing the missile and a line connecting the missile to its Target a solid line indicates the missile's terminal homing range while a dotted line indicates that the missile is under inertial Observer guidance a missile with the dotted line will continue under iog until the solid line gets to the Target at which point the terminal homing mode will activate this can clutter up the scope quite a bit depending on your range setting and there isn't currently any way to disable missile tracks your radar set can stop sending data link to a missile if the target disappears for more than just a couple of seconds or if the number of active data links exceeds the maximum for that specific radar set next we're going to look at multimode radar sets if your radar supports any advanced modes you can switch between them using your keybind for change radar irst mode and your current mode is shown at the top of your scope I'm going to go through all the radar modes one at a time first is pulse Doppler all aspect mode this is indicated on your radar scope as SRC PD or trk PD depending if your radar is in search or tracking mode the easiest oversimplified way to explain Doppler radar is that it sends out pulses and times how long each pulse takes to return and then it uses that information to figure out if something is moving or not if it's not moving it gets filtered out this basically eliminates ground clutter since the ground doesn't move ingenious but there's is a weakness if a Target is flying sideways out in front of the radar set it will look like it's the ground since it's not getting any farther from or closer to the radar set exploiting this to evade detection is a technique known as Doppler notching and if you can't detect something flying side to side out in front of you that's why next is pulse Doppler head-on mode this is indicated on the scope as PD hdn in short the this is a pulse Doppler mode that's tuned to detect targets flying towards you hdn mode can detect targets flying towards the radar set from farther away and more accurately than regular pull stoppler mode keep in mind that while you're in hdn mode you'll have a harder time with radar targets flying away from you also most radar sets in hdn mode have a very hard time with targets that are up close to the radar set you'll see this reflected on your scope as a dead zone down at the bottom and you won't be able to detect or lock anything inside of that dead zone next is pulse Doppler velocity mode this is indicated on the scope as pdv and it's frequently paired with hdn mode so you might see something like SRC pdv hdn as your current radar mode in short pdv mode tracks the velocity of the target instead of its distance from the radar set this means that on the scope faster targets are further up the scope in the clip playing now the Mig 23 passing on my left is in a supersonic Dash while the one on the right is flying slower if you look at the scope the faster plane is shown farther up on the scope even though it's ahead of the slower plane on the right you'll also notice that the scale on the scope has changed from kilometers to kilomet per hour next is moving Target indication mode indicated as MTI on your scope this is an all aspect look down mode that works differently from pulse Doppler MTI mode stores the incoming radar signal in a buffer for a fraction of a second then it Compares that to the new incoming signal it gets and it filters out anything that doesn't change this filters out the ground which doesn't change but it leaves in moving objects ingenious but there's still weakness if an aircraft is flying away from the radar set at the same speed as the radar set is moving it will look like it's not moving at all and it'll get filtered out with the ground clutter if you're chasing someone from directly behind and you can't lock them try turning off MTI mode a special note here some aircraft like this Mirage use MTI as a regular radar mode that you can switch into however some aircraft s switch into MTI automatically at certain altitudes this difference isn't itemized on the stat card in any way but generally it's the Mig 23 family's Sapphire radar that automatically switches and I'll be talking more about that closer to the end of the video next up is track wol scan mode this is indicated on the scope as twws and it can sometimes be combined with other modes you might see twws hdn for example indicating track w scan headon track wall scan allows you to select a target for Active Radar missile launch while still scanning or to just get some additional information without locking it up in short you kind of get a half lock on a Target the selected Target will get a bracket around it that's the same size as a radar lock square but it'll have some gaps on it you can cycle through targets using the normal methods and this can actually be a pretty useful feature to visualize what Target you have selected before going for a regular radar lock selecting but not locking a target with track wall scan allows you to designate it for active missile launch and it also supports radar slaving for advanced infrared missiles however you can not fire or guide a semi-active radar missile using track wol scan next is raid assessment mode indicated on the scope as PD R since this is also a pulse goler mode this radar mode uses a highly focused radar beam to try and differentiate between targets that might be flying in close formation so that three or four targets that are close together don't look like one target out at longer ranges however the functionality in game is a little odd to activate Raam you first have to lock a Target normally then once the target is locked hit your key bind for change radar IRS T mode to activate ra once you're in ra it works basically the same as track wall scan allowing you to cycle through targets the main difference is that Raam is better at targeting individual planes out of a group and it has a very narrow search angle next is track memory mode indicated on the scope as trk mem but not itemized on the stat card this is an advanced feature on some more modern radar sets that tries to defeat Doppler notching and other problems in short the radar stores some information in memory about the target its speed and direction and if it loses the radar lock it tries to figure out where the target is based on that previous information and it keeps pointing the radar dish there even though it isn't seeing the target this can help semi-active radar missiles keep tracking and it can sometimes automatically reacquire the radar lock if the target comes back into view quickly enough unfortunately this mode tends to be very easily distracted by chaff and there's currently no way to turn this off next up is ground targeting mode this isn't itemized on the stat card and it shows up on the scope as GTM more specifically SRC PD GTM this mode allows you to track moving Targets on the ground if a Target stops moving you won't be able to detect or lock it this mode can also be combined with track while scan and the interface functions exactly the same as for other radar modes with the only difference being simply that it's looking for moving Targets on the ground instead of Targets in the air next we have anti- ship mode anti- ship radar isn't identified in any way on the stat card or the scope you'll just notice that in SRC search mode it can see ships but not aircraft the keybinds and UI are all exactly the same except that it's detecting boats in the water note that anti- ship Radars that have an ACM borsight mode can usually Target aircraft with ACM targeting but otherwise can only search or lock ships now we're going to take a look at infrared search and track units these aren't technically radar but they use the radar interface so I'm including them here to activate irst hit your keybind for switch between radar and irst irst itself is a passive sensor that detects heat out in front of the plane mainly the engines of other aircraft but it can also see missiles while their rocket is still firing it doesn't set off radar warning receivers it can't be notched and it doesn't experience ground clutter irst uses the C scope and has no way to detect range to a Target you control search angle and Target selections on the scope using the normal keybinds and it can also lock targets some Advanced irst units like this mig29 also include a Laser Rangefinder this allows it to detect the range to a Target when you lock something up and it'll switch to your regular radar Scope when you lock a Target locking a target with regular irst can be used for infrared missile slaving but not much else Advanced units with the Laser Rangefinder can also be used with eegs for very accurate target Solutions irst cannot be used to guide a semi-active radar missile now let's take a look at the enhanced envelope Gun Site the eegs this is itemized on the stat card of your pilot and ballistics computer rather than the radar set eegs is a feature on Advance jets that provides a Target adjusted impact point for your aircraft's guns in short if you have a radar lock on a Target Your Gun Sight changes once you get within gun range and it shows you where your shots will fly relative to your locked Target this is an impact indicator not a lead indicator and you need to maneuver so that the Gun Sight is directly over the Target and then fire it's not perfectly accurate but it's fairly close I also want to quickly discuss a couple of open items that may change in the medium term so hopefully this video doesn't become outdated too quickly the snail has started adding automatic mode switching onto some higher-end radar sets in short they'll automatically change radar mode based on what they think is best for the current situation for example if you have a Target locked in hdn mode but the lock is starting to fall off it'll try switching to SRC lookup mode instead or switch from SRC to PD so on and so on until recently you would see aut appended to the end of your radar mode on the scope but it seems like they removed that in the current update although it may still come back later this automatic switching might be situationally helpful but it pretty often ends up ruining semi-active radar missile shots or locking onto chaff a lot more easily it's not itemized in any way on the stat card and there's no way to disable it as of making this video so far this feature has proven rather unpopular with the player base and the snail May revert it or change it to being optional through a toggle at some point the last item I want to go over is the LD radar mode LD short for just basic look down is a radar mode that uses a signal processing technique called analog envelope detection to filter out ground clutter without using MTI or pulse dobler but it's not quite as good at lower altitudes up until very recently it was present on a small number of radar sets but the snail has removed it for unknown Reasons I'm mentioning it here in case they add it back in at some point and the functionality for it is still in the game files in a practical sense LD mode just functions like regular search mode but it tries to filter out ground clutter and it can lock targets at lower altitude a bit easier than regular lookup search mode this was a staple feature on the Mig 23's Sapphire radar set which would automatically switch between MTI and LD based on your plane's altitude but as of making this video it just switches between MTI and regular SRC well that about wraps it up for radar and War Thunder thank you so much if you made it all the way to the end now make sure to subscribe and all that stuff so that you don't miss when my guides get updated and also so that you can check out my weekly vehicle reviews which normally drop on Saturdays as always thanks for watching watching and if you enjoyed this video check out this other one