Comment by morphle
5 days ago
I am searching for (part-time) business partners who want to pursue a grant (or find a customer) to develop and build a passive radar system.
We know of such grants and customers, we need motivated people to help us get the grant.
It is mostly a computational software problem that needs a cheap supercomputer, we believe we are experts at that [1].
We already have two test area's where we are not restricted by laws: the Ukraine battlefield (brimming wit jammers and radar) and a radio silence area LOFAR receiver next to a military low fly zone near a large nature reserve and sea.
We hope to find people through Hacker News who can help us get the funding. Maybe even apply at YC.
Please contact me through my HN profile.
See my other comment below on how passive radar could become a game changer (that got downvoted just because I mentioned it here).
Some nice graphics related to passive radar:
[1] Cheap Wafer Scale Integration Supercomputer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbqKClBwFwI
[2] How The U.S. Will Track EVERY Vehicle from Space: SAR GMTI/AMTI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GTpBMPjjFc
[3] The Insane Engineering of Starlink V3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6veU66z2TQ
There is no rocket science here. Every radar has at least one midrange FPGA inside. Every small radar company at least two FPGA devs like me to minimize bus factor.
Regarding passive radar it is nice system in theory. In practical setup it’s not mobile and location bound. Every location has different RF radiation environment. Since transmission is not controlled the reception (and detection) can’t be optimized for anything.
Oh but there is a lot of physics science here [1,2] but indeed no rocket science [3]. FPGA's are just bad design by companies, no science.
I showed your comment to the 20 year old drone detection experts in Ukraine and they laughed at your dismissal, I imagine these guys know a lot more about FPGAs (slide 12 and further of [1]) then you, their lives depend on it every day.
Actual passive radar as we do in the Ukraine kill zones is very difficult science because all radio sources move all the time and the entire environment is full of reflections of moving leaves, nets, etc. Plus multiple moving antennas and jammers.
But then the rewards are big too. At the moment 80% of Russian casualties are from fiber optic FPV or cheaper radio controlled FPV drones only. So if we get even a little passive radar working (mainly by better over the network nanosecond time calibration [1] and orders of magnitude cheaper software defined radio receivers scattered densely on the ground plus cheap decoy transmitters and jammers) we save hundreds of thousands of lives, even tip the balance in winning this war.
Key is the orders of magnitude more complex calculations we do, hence the need for cheap supercomputers (cheaper than NVDIA). The first supercomputer I sold in 1986 to a Phd working on radar at Holland Signaal, the military brach of Philips.
[1] White Rabbit - High precision clock distribution in modern astroparticle experiments https://indico.kit.edu/event/22/contributions/927/attachment...
[2] New timing system for the LOFAR2.0 telescope https://videos.cern.ch/record/3015600
[3] Rocket Science is no rocket science if you get my thrust https://theconversation.com/rocket-science-isnt-rocket-scien...
p.s. Btw, rocket science [3] is the wrong term because that is actually really not very hard science at all, never was. "Elon Musk set back space travel 50 years" - Alan Kay. (He means rocket science is the wrong science for space travel, you need much better propulsion than chemical rockets because of the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation.
Update! Several people contacted us at the Fiberhood cooperative already and offered to help. Please join us, send us an email. morphle73 at g mail com.
We now have a design for an active radar and are adding a passive radar feature, 4x 10 Gbps ethernet and fast GUI software to the radar.
We need a loan from several people to build the prototype and we will make it available online. Please email us if you want to loan us 100 dollars or 100 euros. If you want to be kept informed or want to help, send us an email (in my profile).
We will sell a 2 KM version for around 8000 Euro and a 10 KM version for around 16000 and maybe a 60 KM version.
It will be open sourced and crowdfunded by two sources. A couple of scientists and students will give a lecture series on the operation and the theory behind them with if we get enough emails.
If we get enough donations we will donate the working prototype to soldiers of the Ukrainian Army together with a car, battery and backup diesel generator.
You can sign up as board member for our Fiberhood cooperative, you get to vote on all the decisions. You will have to sign a pdf document on the chamber of commerce website. The other activities of the cooperative are supporting Ukraine, rebuilding Ukraine, building radars, building batteries, building solar panels.
Thanks to everyone who participated in the effort!
Several people asked for an easier way to send us money for a loan, donation or purchasing the radar. The cheapest way we found is Western Union, for example $3.20 for sending 100 Euro in cash. That is cheaper, faster and safer than mailing it in an envelope or with digital payment systems.
We are building and improving the cheapest 20KW range radar systems, donated and delivered directly to Ukranian soldiers. https://protectukraine.nl
We hand-built these systems for anyone for higher quality and lower cost.