ON TOPIC ! A quick brain teaser.

[Eeyore]

You have to be demented to think this so-called brain teaser has any
informational content whatsoever: a crummy little marine radar, ppi
display, detector of unknown specification, a gain cascade of unknown
specification, and a "triangle waveform"- don't you mean sawtooth?

No. Triangle. Think about it.

- the
phone call in the middle of the night, your toothless grin, and a bunch
of other troll trash. No one is going to use a wideband video amp that
does not have logarithmic gain control characteristic, so that has
little do with causing any intrinsic problems. The compromise here is
how to go about maintaining a constant return S/N independent of range

Right. S/N did come into it.

when the attenuation is due to two distinct phenomena: the usual
spherical spreading loss everyone is familiar with by way of the radar
equation varying as LOG(R), and the atmospheric absorption loss varying
directly as R, loss understood to be in dB. You did say this is a marine
radar which I take to mean surface object detection out to the horizon,
making it short range, so the spherical spreading is predominant.

Yes.

Graham