E-8A JSTARS much more effective than E-8C JSTARS, and related radar questions...

[Amnectrus]

I was playing a scenario set in the late 1990s recently and noticed I was having a very hard time pinning down the exact location of some SA-10 sites. I had a U-2 with ASARS radar, an E-8C with the APY-7 AESA, and I even tried using the editor to add in some other planes with ground scanning radar to see if I could get their location from a distance. By accident I found that some F-15Es in the scenario were able to easily pick up the SAM sites from nearly the max range of the radar, while the E-8C could only find them occasionally, and then only over a very narrow band of ranges.

I did some experimenting and found that the E-8A, with its less-sophisticated APY-3 (which I think is a PESA, and about 10 years older), was able to pick up all the SAM sites almost immediately across almost its entire range band. There were a few other units that also worked much better than expected, namely some UAVs with the APY-8 Lynx radar (much shorter range, but same excellent detection ability against ground targets).

I poked around in the database a bit, and the radars that worked best (APY-3, APG-70, and APY-8) all have Sensor Code flags for "Synthetic Aperature [sic] Radar (SAR)", and none of the other ones do. SAR is a mode now found on many fighter AESA radars, and the ASARS radar on the U-2 stands for Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar System, but those radars don't have that Sensor Code. As far as I know, the APG-81 on the F-35 for instance is supposed to be able to generate SAR images of enough detail to tell tanks from APCs, and I assume the APG-82 on the new F-15Es doesn't lack any capability of the old APG-70, including the SAR modes.

Is this an oversight in the database, or something I'm missing about how radars are modeled in the game?

I attached a scenario with a few units to illustrate the differences in performance. This is with Steam version 1.14 Build 998.18.