Re: Like this? Now they use the GPS satellites
Posted by Tim_NC on 2/25/2011, 10:40 pm
No, it doesn't look like that, lol.

Long-range radar sets (range antenna and height antenna) have maximum ranges of 200 miles (effectively less though due to Earth's curvature) and 100K feet in elevation..

The console is a large, round, dark CRT with a pencil-thin light green light beam sweeping the screen. The light beam of course follows the movement of the antenna. (The "height-finder" radar is in the vertical while the "search" radar is in the horizontal.) The beam itself is a multi-million watt pulse of extremely short duration - and the console displays whatever is received by the antenna in-between those pulses.

Airplanes do indeed show up as roundish blips (small planes show small blips, big planes show big blips, lol.) Even without flight plans, no one would ever confuse a Cessna with a commercial airliner.

Being it was the Cold War, and we were right next to Russia...we often jammed our own radars for practice. Sometimes we'd get "chaff" jamming but I could pretty much still figure our the general position of the bomber. Most the time we'd get "electronic jamming" which can be oh so overpowering! When electronic jamming is successful, there's no way in hell to have any idea where the culprit is.

At our end, we did have electronic countermeasures but it was an endless tug-of-war between the jammer and the radar.

The Northern Lights on radar is a bit hard to describe. It's certainly not a blip in any way; it's much more like electronic jamming than anything else - but it's much weaker and never covers the entire screen.

I remember the first time I noticed it. I saw this large field (perhaps 30 or 40 percent of my entire screen) suddenly begin glowing with what looked like some sort of weak background radiation; that is, the radar was clearly seeing something but it didn't appear tangible. I was utterly clueless....until told it was the Northern Lights, lol.

Radars are not universal. There's a variety of types; and any one radar can broadcast at many different frequencies (and changing them rapidly is a factor employed in electronic countermeasures.)

I've never operated a weather radar but I assume they're fine-tuned for weather while search radar is fine-tuned for airplanes. I KNOW plasma shows up on search radars; I can only suspect it does so on weather radar but being I never operated one, I can't say for sure. If plasma does show up on weather radar, I thinks it's quite safe to assume it would NOT look like weather because as with my search radar - it would be apparent to the operator he's seeing something intangible and massive in scale.

Well my man...I think that's enough about radar eh?

Cheers!

Tim in NC





17
In this thread:
Significant Active Region Emerging on Sun - JAC, 2/23/2011, 6:11 am
< Return to the front page of the: message board | monthly archive this page is in
Post A Reply
This thread has been archived and can no longer receive replies.