

Radar Made Easy (1974) - mindcrime
https://archive.org/details/RadarMadeEasy

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Animats
Aw. That's a precious little book. Good coverage of some of the hard issues,
such as receiver filters and delay lines for non-trivial radar waveforms.

Some of the big topics are skipped. The energy of a radar return decreases as
the fourth power of the range, which is why you put megawatts out and get
microwatts back. There's not much on electronics - nothing about how such big
pulses are generated, or the clever trick which allows transmitters and
receivers to share an antenna without blowing out the receiver. As is common
in USSR publications of the period, examples are from US systems, so as to
avoid security problems. Phased array radars are discussed, but not much is
said about how the work. That was a touchy subject back in 1974; all the big
players had phased array radars, but the technology was classified.

(That led to a suppressed invention - Airadar. In 1973, Rufus Applegarth,
who'd had a long career developing avionics, developed a low-cost phased-array
radar with a conformal antenna (not a dish, part of the leading edge of the
wing) and electronic scanning (no moving antenna) and mounted it on a single-
engine plane. It worked great, and Flying Magazine had a chance to see it work
in flight.[1] The USAF was upset; it was much lighter and smaller than what
they had at the time. Airadar was quietly suppressed, and it was years before
radars like that appeared on the commercial market.)

[1]
[https://books.google.com/books?id=NWzlTqj0gQ4C&pg=PA66&lpg=P...](https://books.google.com/books?id=NWzlTqj0gQ4C&pg=PA66&lpg=PA66&dq=Airadar+flying&source=bl&ots=OImchAoy7b&sig=ZiDvRsppXDkdamFxsq3BnkkB4DU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB8Q6AEwAGoVChMI9sCZm-
jSxwIVhqWICh3cPQjC#v=onepage&q=Airadar%20flying&f=false)

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shoo
> The energy of a radar return decreases as the fourth power of the range

I'd guess that's because the power / unit-area falls off like 1/r^2 for a ball
of radius r in R^3, and that's for a one way trip, so another 1/r^2 multiple
for the return trip. Is that sorta-right?

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Symmetry
Thanks exactly it.

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kanche
On an unrelated note - Mir Publishers, font and size of the book made me
reminisce about a book that I had on physics problems by Irodov. Quite a fun
book it was :)

[1]
[https://archive.org/details/IrodovProblemsInGeneralPhysics](https://archive.org/details/IrodovProblemsInGeneralPhysics)

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sbeaks
It is hilarious in parts, comparing choosing a radar to choosing a girlfriend.
I picked up a copy from a street stall in Syria 10 years ago.

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joonoro
This looks very interesting, but I'd like to know from people that have
already read it how relevant it still is since it was published.

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CamperBob2
I just skimmed through the whole thing, and was pretty impressed. It
definitely accomplishes its goal of giving non-experts a broad view of the
whole field. The author alludes to technologies from bistatic radar to
compressed sensing to stealth technology that are still actively-researched
topics.

As far as the basic concepts go, there's really not much new under the sun in
the radar business, but there's been a lot of refinement of principles that
were already known by the 1970s when the book was published. Every few pages
you run into a concept that practically screams for modern DSP techniques.
Matched filters, tapped delay lines, correlators, target classification
algorithms, stuff like that. About the only thing that's conspicuously absent
is any mention of impulse radar.

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dbargatz
Note that both the Kindle version and full-text version have many formatting
issues, but the PDF version appears to be scans of the original book.

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Scramblejams
Thanks for the very useful tip!

