Could this device be built?

[Arny Krueger]

Frequency agile Ku band transmission? What kind of tube did they use for
that?

Klystrons and Magnetrons can be mechanically tuned over a limited range.
Making the receivers track the transmitters is a bigger problem.

Wondering why the Ku band could not just take a handoff and do the
tracking on its own, must not have been a stable track.

The jamming equipment I worked against was pretty limited - it seemed to
only jam one band at a time. After all, it was in a fighter/bomber (F4) not
a B-52.

As long as my HIPIR didn't try to obtain ranging information, the jammer
usualy just enhanced my radar's target tracking accuracy. Seriously, a
target could be kinda marginal for tracking due to extreme range, but when
he turned on his jammer the tracking often tightened right up. His counter
for that was to try to AM his signal close to the rotational speed of the
rotating scanner, but as a rule that was not very effective. It is possible
that his jammer was optimized for a scanner that ran faster or slower.

Since jamming usually *enhanced* HIPIR tracking, making the ROR track for
itself would like going backwards.

Furthermore, once you had even a guess at the target's range, a homing
missle had a good chance of getting to the target. Range info was most
important for knowing when the target was in range. Range did go into the
lead angle calculations for optimizing the intercept, but it was a smaller
part of the solution.

What kind of cheap ill-begotten antenna gets you less angular resolution
at Ku band than X-band?

A really small one, or one with a rough surface, but that wasn't the
problem.

Ku band is appreciably more sensitive to problems with rain and snow, not
that X band isn't also affected by them. But weather is less of a problem
in the X band.

Look at how satellite TV suffers with heavy weather.

 

[Phildo]

I'm picturing a device that would hurl a small projectile, possibly
made of lead (for maximum mass and small size). A guiding tube would
allow accurate aiming. Motive power might be a small controlled
explosion? This could cause considerable damage in a strictly
localised area.

Ah yes, I believe some people have designed a gadget along those very lines
and called them "guns"

Of course, the possbilities for misuse would make such a device
illegal, or at least subject to strict control, in any civilised
society.

That rules out the USA then.

Phildo

 

[Tom2000]

Been there, done that, got a DD-214, a life-time ID card and a monthly
check from Dfas-Cleveland.

Don't know what Dfas means, but, Jim, if you were stationed at the
Nike site in Cleveland, I owe you guys a big thanks.

When I was in the Army, I'd have access to an AUTOVON phone every now
and then. When I was able, I'd call the Cleveland Nike site and ask
for a patch to an outside line for a personal call. You guys were
nice enough to give me the patch, every time, with absolutely no
hassles.

It was really great to talk to my family and girlfriend about every
month or so. It meant a lot to me.

Thanks!

Tom

 

[John Larkin]

It seems to me,
that with modern electronics and information technology,
that a high resolution, handheld, RADAR system is possible.

You could quasi-randomly modulate (Variable transmit and listen periods),
a solid state microwave oscillator (Gunn Diode)
with a digital code with good correlation properties (Gold Code),

cross-correlate the echoes received when in the listen mode
with the Gold Code, then cross-correlate the correlations
from the echoes with stored geo-patterns downloaded
from a Google-Earth like data base covering the area of operation,

compare adjacent (In time) echo returns to spot moving targets,
then present the pattern on a small, solid state, color display
that shows the Google-Earth like picture of the area,
with super-imposed moving targets.

One would not need a directional antenna,
nor high power for such a device,
but it would be necessary to sweep the device around
to build up a good correlation of
the area as one's body and other things
would block the signals and,
even though the Google-Earth like picture,
and the location of the RADAR would still be valid,
but blocked moving targets would not be detected.

Note that if a map of the area of operation is downloaded
into the system, and a set of times from the radar to fixed
targets is compared to the map, one could quickly correlate the
map with the echoes and determine where one is.

With such a device, one could move around,
and see where they were on a moving Google-Earth-like picture,
and see the moving targets about them,
perhaps even colored and shaped by the RADAR signatures
of the targets. (People, cars, tanks, trains, an incoming missle, etc.)

Note that for many situations that such a device could replace GPS.
Just like GPS, after the device determines where one is,
it would be able to compute changes in position quickly.

Hey maybe, I should patent this device?

I'd like to have a short-range imaging radar, sort of like my Flir
handheld thermal imager, as a sort of super stud finder.

Imagine a pc board covered with etched patch antennas, one or more
step-recovery-diode impulse generators, and a lot of sampling
receivers. Run it at several MHz, do a lot of averaging and signal
processing, and reconstruct the image. Maybe use Wii type
accelerometers so as the array is moved around, additional signal
paths can be crunched in to enhance resolution without blurring. The
microwave side of the hardware would be dirt cheap, and the signal
processing would have a high engineering cost but would also be cheap
in production.

Take a look at McEwan's patents for an idea of how the hardware would
work. He was mostly looking at stuff like auto collision detection,
1-dimensional ranging, but imaging is quite feasible if you dump
enough DSP onto the problem.

Firemen could use this for smoke penetration, or cops could spot bad
guys in the next room, and I could spot cats under beds without having
to crawl around on the floor.

John

 

[[email protected]]

Don't know what Dfas means, but, Jim, if you were stationed at the
Nike site in Cleveland, I owe you guys a big thanks.

Defense Finance and Accounting Service; where retired pay comes from.

I was alost assigned to Cleveland, but they switched the orders to
Union Lake, Michigan at the last minute.

When I was in the Army, I'd have access to an AUTOVON phone every now
and then. When I was able, I'd call the Cleveland Nike site and ask
for a patch to an outside line for a personal call. You guys were
nice enough to give me the patch, every time, with absolutely no
hassles.

It was really great to talk to my family and girlfriend about every
month or so. It meant a lot to me.

Thanks!

Most of the Nike sites did that.

 

[[email protected]]

Frequency agile Ku band transmission? What kind of tube did they use for
that? Wondering why the Ku band could not just take a handoff and do the
tracking on its own, must not have been a stable track. What kind of
cheap ill-begotten antenna gets you less angular resolution at Ku band
than X-band?

It used magnetrons, dual, independant receivers and transmitters and a
panoramic display.

It takes a quadurature feed to get angular error information and the
TRR didn't have that and didn't need it as you got all the angular
information needed from the TTR.

 

[Joel Kolstad]

Firemen could use this for smoke penetration, or cops could spot bad
guys in the next room, and I could spot cats under beds without having
to crawl around on the floor.

You can already buy these devices, but of course the price tag is still rather
high (possibly something like $50k/unit!? -- I visited the booth of a company
selling them a couple years back now, and they were targeting fire departments
and other government funded agencies that had that kind of money to throw
around).

Super stud finders would sell like hotcakes once you got them to the $500
level. Even at $2500 you'd probably get plenty of takers. But at $50k... not
so much.

 

[Tom Potter]

I'd like to have a short-range imaging radar, sort of like my Flir
handheld thermal imager, as a sort of super stud finder.

Imagine a pc board covered with etched patch antennas, one or more
step-recovery-diode impulse generators, and a lot of sampling
receivers. Run it at several MHz, do a lot of averaging and signal
processing, and reconstruct the image. Maybe use Wii type
accelerometers so as the array is moved around, additional signal
paths can be crunched in to enhance resolution without blurring. The
microwave side of the hardware would be dirt cheap, and the signal
processing would have a high engineering cost but would also be cheap
in production.

Take a look at McEwan's patents for an idea of how the hardware would
work. He was mostly looking at stuff like auto collision detection,
1-dimensional ranging, but imaging is quite feasible if you dump
enough DSP onto the problem.

Firemen could use this for smoke penetration, or cops could spot bad
guys in the next room, and I could spot cats under beds without having
to crawl around on the floor.

John

Note that John's idea for a hand-held RADAR
differs from mine.

The one I propose would use Google Maps
to correlate with the RADAR data, and to display
where the user was, and the moving targets about him,

whereas John's RADAR would be provide a two,
and perhaps three dimensional picture of the
targets in its' range.

John's RADAR would use techniques like those
used in medical imaging I suppose.

--
Tom Potter

*** Time Magazine Person of the Year 2006 ***
*** May 2007 Anti-Bigot Award ***
http://home.earthlink.net/~tdp
http://tdp1001.googlepages.com/home
http://no-turtles.com
http://www.frappr.com/tompotter
http://spaces.msn.com/tdp1001
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tom-potter
http://tom-potter.blogspot.com

 

[Rich Grise]

AIUI they are termed "brain-death rays"

I thought those were merely the mind-control rays, but I thought their
spectrum also covered 174-216 MHz and 470-890 MHz. ;-)

http://www.ntia.doc.gov/osmhome/allochrt.pdf

Cheers!
Rich

 

[Rich Grise]

At the time, the Bad Guys only had a limited number of standard radar
platforms. So with a spiral antenna and a spectrum analyzer, you could
pretty quickly tell what was in the neighborhood from the emission
frequency and the rough envelope. And with a directional antenna and a
little hunting around, you could pretty quickly localize the direction of
the source. So with a pretty limited toolkit, you could tell what the
bad guys were (ie. targetting radar, sky search, airborne radar) and where
they were. Likewise you could very easily tell a legitimate radar system
from a jammer from the spectrum, and the jamming platforms were fairly
standardized.

Doing this while being shot at is left as an exercise to the student and
may not be as easy as identifing spectral envelopes in an air-conditioned
laboratory.

One of the systems I worked on was the APR-9, "Radar Homing and Warning
Receiver". It had four spiral antennas, one on each corner of the airplane,
and it gave an indication like a PPI of which direction the radar was
coming from, excpet the longer the strobe, the closer/more powerful.

Because of the way the SAM radar worked, when the two beams are in sync,
you know they've locked onto you. It lights up a light in the cockpit,
labeled "AS" for "Acquisition Sector". Needless to say, it came to be
referred to as the "Aw Shit" light. ;-)

Cheers!
Rich

 

[Rich Grise]

Klystrons and Magnetrons can be mechanically tuned over a limited range.
Making the receivers track the transmitters is a bigger problem.


The jamming equipment I worked against was pretty limited - it seemed to
only jam one band at a time. After all, it was in a fighter/bomber (F4) not
a B-52.

ALQ-71? ALQ-72? ALQ-87? QRC-119? ;-)

Cheers!
Rich

 

[Rich Grise]

Rich Grise wrote:

[totally snipped]

Benj

I'd appreciate it if you're going to attribute me, you'd include
at least _some_ of my actual words.

Thanks,
Rich

 

[Rich Grise]

Zappers are great solid state destroyers (transistors make better
fuses than fuses) But you have to get close enough to zap the circuit
boards. (Work great on Computer mother boards!)


Yes, although every wire in the player is a potential antenna
especially for high frequency (radar) EMP.

Electronics have antennas. Bugs have antennae!

In case my other post didn't get cancelled (where I bitch at you
for not quoting me right) I didn't recognize the interleaved style
right away. Sorry.

 

[Rich Grise]

I would assume that an automotive CD player would also be equipped with an
AM/FM tuner, wouldn't you? The OP just mentions a "stereo", anyway.

Even so, zapping their front ends won't have a lot of effect on the
power amp and "speak"ers.

Thanks,
Rich

 

[John Larkin]

Then don't say Google "mbda hpm" and "bae hpm".

It would be asfer for everyone if you stayed away from Google
entirely.

And if I don't use quotes, will I get information on phased array
radars, phased array death rays, or phased array, spread spectrum,
death ray radars?

See above.

John

 

[JosephKK]

Fred Bloggs [email protected] posted to sci.electronics.design:

Frequency agile Ku band transmission? What kind of tube did they
use for that? Wondering why the Ku band could not just take a
handoff and do the tracking on its own, must not have been a
stable track. What kind of cheap ill-begotten antenna gets you
less angular resolution at Ku band than X-band?

Sure, chirp radar is over 40 years old. TWT comes to mind. They
may have had a problem figuring out CSRO for Ku band at the time.
A bent horn?

 

[Don Stockbauer]

Sitting at a gas station as some backwards baseball cap and saggass
britches wearing kid parks in the fire zone in front of the store with
some fukdamuhfukinniggahbeyotch crap blasting out of his truck for
everyone's entertainment, got me to thinking.

Would it be possible to build a gizmo that could be surreptitiously
aimed at the offending stereo system to fry some crucial components?
It would have to be able to do it on a pretty localized basis without
causing damage to the person aiming the gizmo or innocent bystanders
or their car's electronics. Whether it would fry any additional
components of said target punk's car isn't of great concern.

Call it The Rapper Zapper.

Just wonderin'.

Yeah. Invent a time machine and live out your life before the
invention of sound systems.

 

[Mickey530]

Toy? they were used a Carin Airfield, just a few miles from Ft
Rucker Alabama, for the US Army helicopter and US Air Force Air
Traffic
Controller schools. 2 million watts is not a toy. It had a 200 mile
maximum range, and was built by Westinghouse. two complete, hot
systems
that could be switched over at the flip of a switch, if there was any
problems. Five techs on duty, 24/7 doing routine maintenance, and
emergency repairs. If they went down, two schools and 17 airfields
were
shut down to all non instrument rated pilots.

The US Air Force's air traffic control school was and (assuming they
cleaned up after Katrina) is at Keesler AFB, Biloxi, Mississipi. As
was the radar technician school. I was an Air Traffic Controller in
the Air Force from 1975-1982.

At no time did we use "live" radar. It was all simulation. Control
tower training (as opposed to radar training) consisted of students
holding toy airplanes in position as instructed over a ping-pong type
table which had been painted to resemble an airport. Some guys got
pretty good at imitating a cessna's engine noise. ; -)

Further, in both the Air Force and FAA, radar failures were and are
still common. That was one of the major issues that caused the
controller strike in 1982. We had to then convert to non radar
procedures. which consisted of, among other things, increasing
spacing and having the pilots report "fixes". Airports do not close
because of these failures. Non-Instrument rated pilots do not as a
rule use the ATC system except for radar advisories and controllers
provide this service to VFR pilots on a time permitting basis. The
exception is the airspace near large airports and certain other high
traffic areas.

Regards,

MickeyD

 

[Arny Krueger]

Bullshit. The antennas rotate, but the elevation is
fixed.

Tracking radars have both elevation and azimuth axes and drives.

There is no telescope on any RADAR Antenna,

Sure there are, when you have to synchronize them, as you do in a missile
battery.

My recollection is that you sight the acquisition radar on a marker some
distance away, and then sight the trackers on the acq in rotation.

and no way to "Siting the cop's squad car".

Easy to do with with any of the trackers.

There are no keying of brief pulses,

Sure, kick the radar's transmitter out of standby and into transmit.

the system works with a steady stream of pulsed RF,

Or CW.

and measuring the reflected signals.

Congratulations, you finally got a fact right!

If the RADAR equipment in a
cruiser WAS damaged, it was because the idiot cop was too
close to the RADAR site,

In a manner of speaking. ;-)

RADAR sites are usually well inside a fenced area,

Yes, but the fenced in areas aren't necessarily that large.

For example, there are the remains of a Nike Hercules site at N42 34' 15".
W82 58' 23". The building on the north side of the road at that location
looks to me like a Hercules Assembly and Service building. The road running
diagonal south of is is Utica road a major heavily-used public road, and its
been there and in continous service since the 1800s. The radars were on
pylons tree-covered area south of the road.

There was another Nike Hercules site at W83 03' 03" N 42 38' 21". You can
see what it looked like in the days of, at
http://nikehercules.tripod.com/d-06.html . The road that the site is on has
again been there since the 1800s, is a major public road, and was in
continuous service while the site was in use.

far from civilian areas, and

No. There was an Ajax site, nitric acid fuel and all, immediately next to 7
mile road in Detroit, inside the Detroit city limits. Our family drove by it
on the way to church on Sunday. A few hundred feet away from the launchers
were occupied residences.

high enough to clear close in ground clutter.

Concrete pylons or steel towers, if necessary.

The high
gain, highly directional antennas do not radiate enough
near field RF to do any damage,

Just cook birds and land crabs. Oh, and give me sun burns on cloudy days
when I worked on them powered up for adjustments.

unless the cruiser was on
very high a hilltop, and less than a 1/4 mile from the
RADAR site.

As I've shown, many air defense sites had heavily-used public roads running
right through them!

 

[Slappy White]

What may work and has a little more comedic value and stealth than a
full blown gun is a pellet gun (air rifle). Make you own rubber
pellets (indian rubber is best) with a broken peice of cermaic inside.
Fire it at the side or rear window, the cermaic will puncture the
glass causing it to break into little cubes. The rubber will make sure
that it bounces away from the window (no evidence left on the seat)--
have you ever broken a window as a kid with a hard rubber ball, the
ball always came back as opposed to going through. Little sound from
the air rifle (they will never hear it).

In the end the idiots will think the sound system blew out the window.
"Man my system is powoerful, it blew out my window..." They may come
back but it will eventually get expensive for them....

Does not kill the music but it may solve the issue.... If nothing else
they will turn it down to save the windows...

Will not work on the windsheild BTW, different glass.