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I was in a mission, and I detected a aircraft near an enemy airbase via ESM on a ship off the coast of Australia.
The area of uncertainty was centered near the airbase as I expected it to be.
Suddenly the ESM track and the area of uncertainty was 180 degrees out, that is on the opposite side of me over central Australia.
It would alter between the airbase and central Australia every few moments.
The aircraft did not have the range to reach Western Australia, let alone Central Australia.
I am curious if this is expected behavior or a bug.

AFAIK, that's always been the way the game has operated.  It calculates the Uncertainty zone according to the sensitivity of the sensor.  Sometimes, the icon bounces all over the place because it cannot be located.  For example, ships and subs can sometimes appear over land because the Game calculates that it 'could' be there according to the range and sensitivity (even though we all know it is impossible).  I don't like all the bouncing around, either, but I think that's just the way the game works.  [:)]

makobyte,

What you've probably seen is the ESM system having the previously Active contact go Passive. ESM generates bearing information, so once the contact goes passive the bearing is uncertain. The general line of bearing is maintained but the uncertainty will now extend the line of bearing to what appears to be a 180 degree bearing error.

Check the contact when this happens, select and click "Report" in the Unit Status window. There's a sub-window showing "detected emissions" if the sensor has an " * " preceeding it, the radar is active/emitting. Once that asterisk disappears the contact will have gone passive.



Cheers

Darren

Now here's the same system once it's gone to passive mode and you're likely to see the issue your reporting.

Cheers

Darren

Howdy Makobyte,

What version are you running? There was an issue where an ESM contact with a large Uncertainty Zone would 'flip' from one side of the map to the other. A fix was attempted in 3.9.4 and I haven't seen the same behavior since.

Thanks,

Russell