Work in Progress: Virtual Instrumentation in Electronic Warfare Education

Aiming education and research in electronic warfare (EW), the Brazilian Air Force acquired an electronic warfare training system. Its operation integrated with tools of Virtual Instrumentation (VI) has didactic potential to be explored either in local or remote laboratory courses. The Work in Progress presented in this paper has as objectives to study the concepts and techniques involved with VI´s and to apply them in the context of practical instruction of EW in academy. The first phase of study consisted in the development of an interface (hardware) for computer control of radar jamming pod and the study of the data format used by it. The data format study was necessary in order to make possible the communication between the VI and the radar jamming pod. LabVIEW graphical language was chosen to develop the VI. Other tools to allow control the entire electronic warfare training system will be developed in next phase and discussed here