How radars work

Overview

Radar Screensaver is a kind of radar software that is very illustrative in understanding how the radars doing their work.

Radar is something that is in use all around us, although it is normally invisible. Air traffic control uses radar to track planes both on the ground and in the air, and also to guide planes in for smooth landings. NASA uses radar to map the Earth and other planets, to track satellites and space debris and to help with things like docking and maneuvering. The military uses it to detect the enemy and to guide weapons.

Meteorologists use radar to track storms, hurricanes and tornadoes. You even see a form of radar at many grocery stores when the doors open automatically! Obviously, radar is an extremely useful technology.

When people use radar, they are usually trying to accomplish one of three things:

  • Detect the presence of an object at a distance - Usually the "something" is moving, like an airplane, but radar can also be used to detect stationary objects buried underground. In some cases, radar can identify an object as well; for example, it can identify the type of aircraft it has detected.
  • Detect the speed of an object - This is the reason why police use radar.
  • Map something - The space shuttle and orbiting satellites use something called Synthetic Aperture Radar to create detailed topographic maps of the surface of planets and moons.

Principle

All three of these activities can be accomplished using two things you may be familiar with from everyday life: echo and Doppler shift. These two concepts are easy to understand in the realm of sound because your ears hear echo and Doppler shift every day. Radar makes use of the same techniques using radio waves. Our Radar Screensaver simulates operation with echo.

Echo is something you experience all the time. If you shout into a well or a canyon, the echo comes back a moment later. The echo occurs because some of the sound waves in your shout reflect off of a surface (either the water at the bottom of the well or the canyon wall on the far side) and travel back to your ears. The length of time between the moment you shout and the moment that you hear the echo is determined by the distance between you and the surface that creates the echo.

We have seen that the echo of a sound can be used to determine how far away something is. It is therefore possible to create a "sound radar", and that is exactly what sonar is. Submarines and boats use sonar all the time. You could use the same principles with sound in the air, but sound in the air has a couple of problems:

  • Sound does not travel very far -- maybe a mile at the most.
  • Almost everyone can hear sounds, so a "sound radar" would definitely disturb the neighbors (you can eliminate most of this problem by using ultrasound instead of audible sound).
  • Because the echo of the sound would be very faint, it is likely that it would be hard to detect.

Radar therefore uses radio waves instead of sound. Radio waves travel far, are invisible to humans and are easy to detect even when they are faint.

A typical radar set designed to detect airplanes in flight. The radar set turns on its transmitter and shoots out a short, high-intensity burst of high-frequency radio waves. The burst might last a microsecond. The radar set then turns off its transmitter, turns on its receiver and listens for an echo. The radar set measures the time it takes for the echo to arrive, as well as the Doppler shift of the echo. Radio waves travel at the speed of light, roughly 1,000 feet per microsecond; so if the radar set has a good high-speed clock, it can measure the distance of the airplane very accurately. Using special signal processing equipment, the radar set can also measure the Doppler shift very accurately and determine the speed of the airplane.

The radar antenna sends out a short, high-power pulse of radio waves at a known frequency. When the waves hit an object, they echo off of it and the speed of the object Doppler-shifts the echo. The same antenna is used to receive the much-weaker signals that return.

More detailed information is available at electronics.howstuffworks.com/radar.htm.

 

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