What does radar stand for?

Question

Is it an acronym or somthing?

Answer 1

Radio Detection and Ranging

Answer 2

RAdio Detection And Ranging

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar

Answer 3

RAdio Detection And Ranging.

Answer 4

It's an acronym for RAdio Detection And Ranging.

Answer 5

RAdio Dection And Ranging

Answer 6

radio airile detection and range

Answer 7

radio detection and ranging and sonar also has 1 2,but i 4got dat 1

Answer 8

RADAR is a system that uses radio waves to determine and map the location, direction, and/or speed of both moving and fixed objects such as aircraft, ships, motor vehicles, weather formations and terrain. A transmitter emits radio waves, which are reflected by the target and detected by a receiver, typically in the same location as the transmitter. Although the radio signal returned is usually very weak, radio signals can easily be amplified, so radar can detect objects at ranges where other emissions, such as sound or visible light, would be too weak to detect. Radar is used in many contexts, including meteorological detection of precipitation, air traffic control, police detection of speeding traffic, and by the military.

The term RADAR was coined in 1941 as an acronym for Radio Detection and Ranging. This acronym of American origin replaced the previously used British abbreviation RDF (Radio Direction Finding). The term has since entered the English language as a standard word, radar, losing the capitalization in the process.

Several inventors, scientists, and engineers contributed to the development of radar. The use of radio waves to detect "the presence of distant metallic objects via radio waves" was first implemented in 1904 by Christian Hülsmeyer,[2][3] who demonstrated the feasibility of detecting the presence of a ship in dense fog, but not its distance. He received a Reichspatent patent Nr. 165546 for his pre-radar device in April and on November 11, 1904 the patent 169154 an amendment of his patent for ranging that is indirectly related to his device. He received a patent (GB13170) in England for his telemobiloscope on September 22 1904.[2][4]

Prior to the Second World War, developments by the Americans, the Germans, the French (French Patent n° 788795 in 1934),[5] and the British (British Patent GB593017 by Robert Watson-Watt in 1935),[5] [6] led to the first real radars. Hungarian Zoltán Bay produced a working model by 1936 at the Tungsram laboratory in the same vein.

The war precipitated the research to find better resolution, more portability, more features for that new defensive weapon. Post-war years have seen the use of radar in fields as diverse as air traffic control, weather monitoring, astrometry and road speed control.


Principles

[edit] Reflection

Brightness can indicate reflectivity as in this 1960 weather radar image. The radar's frequency, pulse form, and antenna largely determine what it can observe.Electromagnetic waves reflect (scatter) from any large change in the dielectric or diamagnetic constants. This means that a solid object in air or vacuum, or other significant change in atomic density between the object and what's surrounding it, will usually scatter radar (radio) waves. This is particularly true for electrically conductive materials, such as metal and carbon fibre, making radar particularly well suited to the detection of aircraft and ships. Radar absorbing material, containing resistive and sometimes magnetic substances, is used on military vehicles to reduce radar reflection. This is the radio equivalent of painting something a dark colour.

Radar waves scatter in a variety of ways depending on the size (wavelength) of the radio wave and the shape of the target. If the wavelength is much shorter than the target's size, the wave will bounce off in a way similar to the way light is reflected by a mirror. If the wavelength is much longer than the size of the target, the target is polarized (positive and negative charges are separated), like a dipole antenna. This is described by Rayleigh scattering, an effect that creates the Earth's blue sky and red sunsets. When the two length scales are comparable, there may be resonances. Early radars used very long wavelengths that were larger than the targets and received a vague signal, whereas some modern systems use shorter wavelengths (a few centimetres or shorter) that can image objects as small as a loaf of bread or smaller.

Short radio waves reflect from curves and corners, in a way similar to glint from a rounded piece of glass. The most reflective targets for short wavelengths have 90° angles between the reflective surfaces. A structure consisting of three flat surfaces meeting at a single corner, like the corner on a box, will always reflect waves entering its opening directly back at the source. These so-called corner reflectors are commonly used as radar reflectors to make otherwise difficult-to-detect objects easier to detect, and are often found on boats in order to improve their detection in a rescue situation and to reduce collisions. For similar reasons, objects attempting to avoid detection will angle their surfaces in a way to eliminate inside corners and avoid surfaces and edges perpendicular to likely detection directions, which leads to "odd" looking stealth aircraft. These precautions do not completely eliminate reflection because of diffraction, especially at longer wavelengths. Half wavelength long wires or strips of conducting material, such as chaff, are very reflective but do not direct the scattered energy back toward the source. The extent to which an object reflects or scatters radio waves is called its radar cross section.

Jamming
Radar jamming refers to RF signals originating from sources outside the radar, transmitting in the radar's frequency and thereby masking targets of interest. Jamming may be intentional (as an anti-radar electronic warfare (EW) tactic) or unintentional (e.g., by friendly forces operating equipment that transmits using the same frequency range). Jamming is considered an active interference source, since it is initiated by elements outside the radar and in general unrelated to the radar signals.

Jamming is problematic to radar since the jamming signal only needs to travel one-way (from the jammer to the radar receiver) whereas the radar echoes travel two-ways (radar-target-radar) and are therefore significantly reduced in power by the time they return to the radar receiver. Jammers therefore can be much less powerful than their jammed radars and still effectively mask targets along the line of sight from the jammer to the radar (Mainlobe Jamming). Jammers have an added effect of affecting radars along other line-of-sights, due to the radar receiver's sidelobes (Sidelobe Jamming).

Mainlobe jamming can generally only be reduced by narrowing the mainlobe solid angle, and can never fully be eliminated when directly facing a jammer which uses the same frequency and polarization as the radar. Sidelobe jamming can be overcome by reducing receiving sidelobes in the radar antenna design and by using an omnidirectional antenna to detect and disregard non-mainlobe signals. Other anti-jamming techniques are frequency hopping and polarization. See Electronic counter-counter-measures for details.

Interference has recently become a problem for C-band (5.66 GHz) meteorological radars with the proliferation of 5.4 GHz band WiFi equipment.[7]

[edit] Radar signal processing

[edit] Distance measurement

[edit] Transit time

Pulse radar
Principle of radar distance measurement using pulse round trip time. One way to measure the distance to an object is to transmit a short pulse of radio signal, and measure the time it takes for the reflection to return. The distance is one-half the product of round trip time (because the signal has to travel to the target and then back to the receiver) and the speed of the signal. where c is the speed of light in a vacuum, and τ is the round trip time. For radar, the speed of signal is the speed of light, making the round trip times very short for terrestrial ranging. Accurate distance measurement requires high-performance electronics.

The receiver cannot detect the return while the signal is being sent out – there is no way to tell if the signal it hears is the original or the return. This means that a radar has a distinct minimum range, which is the length of the pulse multiplied by the speed of light, divided by two. In order to detect closer targets one must use a shorter pulse length.

A similar effect imposes a specific maximum range as well. If the return from the target comes in when the next pulse is being sent out, once again the receiver cannot tell the difference. In order to maximize range, one wants to use longer times between pulses, the inter-pulse time.

These two effects tend to be at odds with each other, and it is not easy to combine both good short range and good long range in a single radar. This is because the short pulses needed for a good minimum range broadcast have less total energy, making the returns much smaller and the target harder to detect. This could be offset by using more pulses, but this would shorten the maximum range again. So each radar uses a particular type of signal. Long range radars tend to use long pulses with long delays between them, and short range radars use smaller pulses with less time between them. This pattern of pulses and pauses is known as the Pulse Repetition Frequency (or PRF), and is one of the main ways to characterize a radar. As electronics have improved many radars now can change their PRF.


[edit] Frequency modulation
Another form of distance measuring radar is based on frequency modulation. Frequency comparison between two signals is considerably more accurate, even with older electronics, than timing the signal. By changing the frequency of the returned signal and comparing that with the original, the difference can be easily measured.

This technique can be used in radar systems, and is often found in aircraft radar altimeters. In these systems a "carrier" radar signal is frequency modulated in a predictable way, typically varying up and down with a sine wave or sawtooth pattern at audio frequencies. The signal is then sent out from one antenna and received on another, typically located on the bottom of the aircraft, and the signal can be continuously compared.

Since the signal frequency is changing, by the time the signal returns to the aircraft the broadcast has shifted to some other frequency. The amount of that shift is greater over longer times, so greater frequency differences mean a longer distance, the exact amount being the "ramp speed" selected by the electronics. The amount of shift is therefore directly related to the distance travelled, and can be displayed on an instrument. This signal processing is similar to that used in speed detecting Doppler radar. See the article on continuous wave radar for more information.


[edit] Speed measurement
Speed is the change in distance to an object with respect to time. Thus the existing system for measuring distance, combined with a little memory to see where the target last was, is enough to measure speed. At one time the memory consisted of a user making grease-pencil marks on the radar screen, and then calculating the speed using a slide rule. Modern radar systems perform the equivalent operation faster and more accurately using computers.

However, if the transmitter's output is coherent (phase synchronized), there is another effect that can be used to make almost instant speed measurements (no memory is required), known as the Doppler effect. Most modern radar systems use this principle in the pulse-doppler radar system. Return signals from targets are shifted away from this base frequency via the Doppler effect enabling the calculation of the speed of the object relative to the radar. The Doppler effect is only able to determine the relative speed of the target along the line of sight from the radar to the target. Any component of target velocity perpendicular to this line of sight cannot be determined by Doppler alone---tracking the target's azimuth over time must be used.

It is also possible to make a radar without any pulsing, known as a continuous-wave radar (CW radar), by sending out a very pure signal of a known frequency. CW radar is ideal for determining the radial component of a target's velocity, but it cannot determine the target's range. CW radar is typically used by traffic enforcement to measure vehicle speed quickly and accurately where range is not important.


[edit] Reduction of interference effects
Signal processing is employed in radar systems to reduce the interference effects. Signal processing techniques include moving target indication (MTI), pulse doppler, moving target detection (MTD) processors, correlation with secondary surveillance radar (SSR) targets and space-time adaptive processing (STAP). Constant false alarm rate (CFAR) and digital terrain model (DTM) processing are also used in clutter environments.

Radar engineering

Radar componentsA radar has different components:

A transmitter that generates the radio signal with an oscillator such as a klystron or a magnetron and controls its duration by a modulator.
A waveguide that links the transmitter and the antenna.
A duplexer that serves as a switch between the antenna and the transmitter or the receiver for the signal when the antenna is used in both situations.
A receiver.
An electronic section that controls all those devices and the antenna to perform the radar scan ordered by a software.
A link to end users.