Comment by swores
2 years ago
Thanks! I wouldn't have guessed the sizes were so large for radar, and just assumed that in current era radar would have progressed to the point of even being able to not send pings at the rotating blades in sync with their rotations (ie always firing radar somewhere within the circle but only at the spots where the blades are not) the same way machine guns fired past propellers on WW2 (or WW1?) fighter planes figured out. But of course a bullet and a radar setup isn't at all the same thing.
The details I give are for marine radar, where off-shore wind-farms are a significant issue. But radar in general works on similar wavelengths, and a lot of clever processing can be done to "improve" the images you get back, especially when you have a lot of images that can be combined, rather than sweeping the radar around and only get 20 to 120 sweeps per minute.
There are trade-offs between how often you can ping versus how far you want to see versus how much energy you can send out versus how big the "lumps" are, etc. The sums/calculations are pretty simple, but not obvious until you've seen them, and then they are.
But if you want to see something at 32NM ~ 60km, you have to send out a lot of energy, so the "lumps" need to be pretty big, especially as the returns drop off as a fourth power with distance.
Any idea to what extent the problems can or can't be solved by money vs. a limit on maximum quality of radar before needing to break the laws of physics to improve further?
E.g. are the US military saying "yep those are the issues we face too" or "haha our tech has more than enough energy to get around all these problems"?
Most of what I know in these areas is either something I can't talk about, or is surmise based on conversations between others when I was around. There's a lot to do with the laws of physics, but equally, many times people have found clever things to do with the data they have.
I wouldn't care to speculate further, but you might want to read about phased array antennas, and FMCW radar. There are some very deep rabbit holes here, and I certainly would not be your best guide.
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