How do I use air to air radar?

When flying the Viper, for example on the AIM-120 target practice mission over Nevada, it sees that the AAR doesn't work correctly. Granted it could well be user error, but I really don't think it is. I can be pointing right at a target aircraft but unless i find it in boresite mode, the planes don't show up on radar. If I'm in standard CRM mode, I can point straight at a plane and nothing on the radar screen at all.

Any thoughts on this? Help would be greatly appreciated.

There may be a lot of reasons why the aircraft doesn't show up on your radar screen.

The most obvious to me is that perhaps your radar isn't pointing at the target. Check your radar elevation first as this is the most common culprit.

Contrary to what most people believe, a radar is not a magical item that detects anything that is in its field of view. There might be other reasons your radar is not picking up a target but usually the operator plays a large part in when the radar sees what it does. Learn which mode and what parameters are best for each situation and you will find that the radar, for some magical reason, will suddenly detect much more targets.

This is a very nice guide, bit long but very useful.

My best experience with the f16 radar was a tanker turning from hot to cold.

Suddenly the hardlimit of 20nm for cold targets applied for the tanker even though I could see it at 50 or 60 earlier when it was hot.

Thanks y'all. Let me check the video out. As I said, good chance I'm doing something wrong just trying to figure out what. Also should have mentioned I'm actually good with the F/A-18 radar and have no issues with it. That could also be part of it. May be used to it and the way it works and could well be different from the operation of the Viper radar.

Thanks for the help. I'll spend some more time on it and jump into some other missions to see if it also may be related to the mission I was on.