Harpoon and comm link

[CapitanPiluso]

As Harpoon players know, you have the choice to activate or de activate comm link radio signal among your forces.
I understand that -in an initial situation- with comm link enabled you have a better defensive situation, but on the other hand you are more "visible" to the enemy cause he can know you are there if he detects radio activity via ESM or even radar.
So perhaps the best approach is to set comm link to intermitent setting and turn it on when a defensive action is inminent.
Any ideas about this ?

[Blacklight]

I'm big into radio silence for my forces. I'll only turn anything that emits anything on either in a dire emergency when I need to know locations and directions of the bad guys fast. Otherwise, I keep everything passive.

[Herman]

Originally Posted by CapitanPiluso

As Harpoon players know, you have the choice to activate or de activate comm link radio signal among your forces.
I understand that -in an initial situation- with comm link enabled you have a better defensive situation, but on the other hand you are more "visible" to the enemy cause he can know you are there if he detects radio activity via ESM or even radar.

So perhaps the best approach is to set comm link to intermitent setting and turn it on when a defensive action is inminent.
Any ideas about this ?

The communications feature is mostly used under the Full Reality difficulty setting. When a scenario is played under Full Reality, submarines that submerge are out of contact with surface units and will carry out their last assigned orders before returning to Periscope depth for new instructions.

However, most PlayersDB scenarios are written and tested with the Auto-datalinks setting. This means that all units are always connected to one another via data-linkages. This means that the Comm Link cannot be turned off. Even if the setting is turned off, a data-link still exists and the units will still exchange information when a scenario is played with Auto-Datalinks.

At this time, datalinks and radio activity cannot be detected by ESM in Harpoon. Only active sources like Radar, Sonar, and ECM can be detected by opposing forces. In addition, ECM can only be detected by Active Radar. ESM cannot detect active jamming in Harpoon (even though it may be possible in real life.)

[CapitanPiluso]

It,s nice to know that I ll have less options to check and set in my next Harpoon games...

It´s bad to know that ESM can not detect radio and comm links.

Perhaps some day this could be fixed ...

[Herman]

The ability to detect and jam radio communications would certainly be a nice future feature, but it might not be fair nor accurate to characterize the current situation as 'broken', either.

AFAIK, the game never had this feature nor promised it. Therefore, it hard to say that it is broken unlike Underway Replenishment that was advertised as a game feature from the first version of Harpoon II and still does not work properly after 17 years.