Post-war Radar
World War II, which gave impetus to the great surge in radar development, ended between the Allies and Germany in May 1945, followed by Japan in August. With this, radar activities in Germany and Japan ceased for a number of years. In other countries, particularly the United States, Great Britain, and the USSR, the politically unstable post-war years saw continued radar improvements for military applications. In fact, these three nations all made significant efforts in bringing scientists and engineers from Germany to work in their weapon programs; in the U.S., this was under Operation Paperclip.
Even before the end of the war, various project directed toward non-military applications of radar and closely related technologies were initiated. The US Army Air Forces and the British RAF had made wartime advances in using radar for handling aircraft landing, and this was rapidly expanded into the civil sector. The field of radio astronomy was one of the related technologies; although discovered before the war, it immediately flourished in the late 1940s with many scientists around the world establishing new careers based on their radar experience.
Four techniques, highly important in post-war radars, were matured in the late 1940s-early 1950s: pulse Doppler, monopulse, phased array, and synthetic aperture; the first three were known and even used during wartime developments, but were matured later.
- Pulse-Doppler radar (often known as moving target indication or MTI), uses the Doppler-shifted signals from targets to better detect moving targets in the presence of clutter.
- Monopulse radar (also called simultaneous lobing) was conceived by Robert Page at the NRL in 1943. With this, the system derives error-angle information from a single pulse, greatly improving the tracking accuracy.
- Phased-array radar has the many segments of a large antenna separately controlled, allowing the beam to be quickly directed. This greatly reduces the time necessary to change the beam direction from one point to another, allowing almost simultaneous tracking of multiple targets while maintaining overall surveillance.
- Synthetic-aperture radar (SAR), was invented in the early 1950s at Goodyear Aircraft Corporation. Using a single, relatively small antenna carried on an aircraft, a SAR combines the returns from each pulse to produce a high-resolution image of the terrain comparable that that obtained by a much larger antenna. SAR has wide applications, particularly in mapping and remote sensing.
One of the early applications of digital computers was in switching the signal phase in elements of large phased-array antennas. As smaller computers came into being, these were quickly applied to digital signal processing using algorithms for improve radar performance.
Other advances in radar systems and applications in the decades following WWII are far too many to be included herein. The following sections are intended to provide representative samples.
Read more about this topic: History Of Radar
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