8 Jun
2000
8 Jun
'00
12:20 p.m.
Radar is old, many years prewar but the knowledge
to do the needed signal processing and presentation took
longer to develop. It's the subtleties of the reflected signal
that has information of greater interest beyond simple range.
I must disagree, as the old A, B, and C-scopes (and derivatives) were
present and used on nearly all radars until 1948 or so. The radarman did
the signal processing in his head, mostly by looking at the (nearly*) raw
video coming off the receiver. By the late 1950s, however, the signal
processing did start to get complex (one of these days I have to rescue a
vacuum tube based vector display from a guy. Hundreds of tubes.).
*downconverted, of course, and maybe some anti-jam stuff thrown in
(basically controlls to play with the AGC constants).
William Donzelli
aw288(a)osfn.org