Hi Looking at the gizmo they have on display, I'd bet you get a pretty good return off the bottom of the beast. Not quite as good a return off of the top. Indeed the issue does date to F-117 days, they had to calculate mission parameters to keep the "sides" from facing the wrong way...
Bob On Dec 15, 2011, at 8:29 PM, Jim Lux wrote: > On 12/15/11 4:53 PM, Bob Camp wrote: >> Hi >> >> Radar bounces off the flat sides very nicely …. >> > > You are right, it does, but it doesn't bounce BACK towards the observer, > which is what you care about. Consider a flat plate at a 45 degree angle > from you. All the radar energy bounces to the side. Turns out that it's > diffraction from the edges of those sides that's the limiting aspect. > > > The first stealth planes (e.g. F-117) were all flat surfaces because you > could actually calculate the reflections and make sure you didn't > inadvertently create a corner reflector. > > This is one reason that bistatic radar (transmitter and receiver in different > places) is interesting. You can detect things that have very low monostatic > radar cross section (RCS). (also, radar transmitters are easy to shoot at, > because they're like a big beacon saying "here I am"... so put out a bunch of > transmitters and one receiver and have the expensive signal processing and > operators at the receiver, which is entirely passive). > > Even better, you can use something benign as an illuminator... Many of us > have used a TV station as a passive illuminator for a bistatic radar, using > your analog TV set as the detector. > > > Later, as computational horsepower increased, they could make nice swoopy > surfaces with low RCS, and what's more to the point, low bistatic RCS. > > > _______________________________________________ > time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] > To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts > and follow the instructions there. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
