History of RADAR

VK2RK

Active member
Radar_antenna.jpg

History of radar
https://www.britannica.com/technology/radar/History-of-radar

Early experiments

Serious developmental work on radar began in the 1930s, but the basic idea of radar had its origins in the classical experiments on electromagnetic radiation conducted by German physicist Heinrich Hertz during the late 1880s. Hertz set out to verify experimentally the earlier theoretical work of Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell had formulated the general equations of the electromagnetic field, determining that both light and radio waves are examples of electromagnetic waves governed by the same fundamental laws but having widely different frequencies. Maxwell’s work led to the conclusion that radio waves can be reflected from metallic objects and refracted by a dielectric medium, just as light waves can. Hertz demonstrated these properties in 1888, using radio waves at a wavelength of 66 cm (which corresponds to a frequency of about 455 MHz).

The potential utility of Hertz’s work as the basis for the detection of targets of practical interest did not go unnoticed at the time. In 1904 a patent for “an obstacle detector and ship navigation device,” based on the principles demonstrated by Hertz, was issued in several countries to Christian Hülsmeyer, a German engineer. Hülsmeyer built his invention and demonstrated it to the German navy but failed to arouse any interest. There was simply no economic, societal, or military need for radar until the early 1930s, when long-range military bombers capable of carrying large payloads were developed. This prompted the major countries of the world to look for a means with which to detect the approach of hostile aircraft.

Most of the countries that developed radar prior to World War II first experimented with other methods of aircraft detection. These included listening for the acoustic noise of aircraft engines and detecting the electrical noise from their ignition. Researchers also experimented with infrared sensors. None of these, however, proved effective.

First military radars
During the 1930s, efforts to use radio echoes for aircraft detection were initiated independently and almost simultaneously in eight countries that were concerned with the prevailing military situation and that already had practical experience with radio technology. The United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, the Soviet Union, Italy, the Netherlands, and Japan all began experimenting with radar within about two years of one another and embarked, with varying degrees of motivation and success, on its development for military purposes. Several of these countries had some form of operational radar equipment in military service at the start of World War II.

The first observation of the radar effect at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, D.C., was made in 1922. NRL researchers positioned a radio transmitter on one shore of the Potomac River and a receiver on the other. A ship sailing on the river unexpectedly caused fluctuations in the intensity of the received signals when it passed between the transmitter and receiver. (Today such a configuration would be called bistatic radar.) In spite of the promising results of this experiment, U.S. Navy officials were unwilling to sponsor further work.

The principle of radar was “rediscovered” at NRL in 1930 when L.A. Hyland observed that an aircraft flying through the beam of a transmitting antenna caused a fluctuation in the received signal. Although Hyland and his associates at NRL were enthusiastic about the prospect of detecting targets by radio means and were eager to pursue its development in earnest, little interest was shown by higher authorities in the navy. Not until it was learned how to use a single antenna for both transmitting and receiving (now termed monostatic radar) was the value of radar for detecting and tracking aircraft and ships fully recognized. Such a system was demonstrated at sea on the battleship USS New York in early 1939.

The first radars developed by the U.S. Army were the SCR-268 (at a frequency of 205 MHz) for controlling antiaircraft gunfire and the SCR-270 (at a frequency of 100 MHz) for detecting aircraft. Both of these radars were available at the start of World War II, as was the navy’s CXAM shipboard surveillance radar (at a frequency of 200 MHz). It was an SCR-270, one of six available in Hawaii at the time, that detected the approach of Japanese warplanes toward Pearl Harbor, near Honolulu, on December 7, 1941; however, the significance of the radar observations was not appreciated until bombs began to fall.

Britain commenced radar research for aircraft detection in 1935. The British government encouraged engineers to proceed rapidly because it was quite concerned about the growing possibility of war. By September 1938 the first British radar system, the Chain Home, had gone into 24-hour operation, and it remained operational throughout the war. The Chain Home radars allowed Britain to deploy successfully its limited air defenses against the heavy German air attacks conducted during the early part of the war. They operated at about 30 MHz—in what is called the shortwave, or HF, band—which is actually quite a low frequency for radar. It might not have been the optimum solution, but the inventor of British radar, Sir Robert Watson-Watt, believed that something that worked and was available was better than an ideal solution that was only a promise or might arrive too late.

The Soviet Union also started working on radar during the 1930s. At the time of the German attack on their country in June 1941, the Soviets had developed several different types of radars and had in production an aircraft-detection radar that operated at 75 MHz (in the very-high-frequency [VHF] band). Their development and manufacture of radar equipment was disrupted by the German invasion, and the work had to be relocated.

At the beginning of World War II, Germany had progressed farther in the development of radar than any other country. The Germans employed radar on the ground and in the air for defense against Allied bombers. Radar was installed on a German pocket battleship as early as 1936. Radar development was halted by the Germans in late 1940 because they believed the war was almost over. The United States and Britain, however, accelerated their efforts. By the time the Germans realized their mistake, it was too late to catch up.

Except for some German radars that operated at 375 and 560 MHz, all of the successful radar systems developed prior to the start of World War II were in the VHF band, below about 200 MHz. The use of VHF posed several problems. First, VHF beamwidths are broad. (Narrow beamwidths yield greater accuracy, better resolution, and the exclusion of unwanted echoes from the ground or other clutter.) Second, the VHF portion of the electromagnetic spectrum does not permit the wide bandwidths required for the short pulses that allow for greater accuracy in range determination. Third, VHF is subject to atmospheric noise, which limits receiver sensitivity. In spite of these drawbacks, VHF represented the frontier of radio technology in the 1930s, and radar development at this frequency range constituted a genuine pioneering accomplishment. It was well understood by the early developers of radar that operation at even higher frequencies was desirable, particularly since narrow beamwidths could be achieved without excessively large antennas.

Advances during World War II
The opening of higher frequencies (those of the microwave region) to radar, with its attendant advantages, came about in late 1939 when the cavity magnetron oscillator was invented by British physicists at the University of Birmingham. In 1940 the British generously disclosed to the United States the concept of the magnetron, which then became the basis for work undertaken by the newly formed Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Radiation Laboratory at Cambridge. It was the magnetron that made microwave radar a reality in World War II.

The successful development of innovative and important microwave radars at the MIT Radiation Laboratory has been attributed to the urgency for meeting new military capabilities as well as to the enlightened and effective management of the laboratory and the recruitment of talented, dedicated scientists. More than 100 different radar systems were developed as a result of the laboratory’s program during the five years of its existence (1940–45).

One of the most notable microwave radars developed by the MIT Radiation Laboratory was the SCR-584, a widely used gunfire-control system. It employed conical scan tracking—in which a single offset (squinted) radar beam is continuously rotated about the radar antenna’s central axis—and, with its four-degree beamwidth, it had sufficient angular accuracy to place antiaircraft guns on target without the need for searchlights or optics, as was required for older radars with wider beamwidths (such as the SCR-268). The SCR-584 operated in the frequency range from 2.7 to 2.9 GHz (known as the S band) and had a parabolic reflector antenna with a diameter of nearly 6.6 feet (2 metres). It was first used in combat early in 1944 on the Anzio beachhead in Italy. Its introduction was timely, since the Germans by that time had learned how to jam its predecessor, the SCR-268. The introduction of the SCR-584 microwave radar caught the Germans unprepared.

Postwar progress
After the war, progress in radar technology slowed considerably. The last half of the 1940s was devoted principally to developments initiated during the war. Two of these were the monopulse tracking radar and the moving-target indication (MTI) radar (discussed in the section Doppler frequency and target velocity). It required many more years of development to bring these two radar techniques to full capability.

New and better radar systems emerged during the 1950s. One of these was a highly accurate monopulse tracking radar designated the AN/FPS-16, which was capable of an angular accuracy of about 0.1 milliradian (roughly 0.006 degree). There also appeared large, high-powered radars designed to operate at 220 MHz (VHF) and 450 MHz (UHF). These systems, equipped with large mechanically rotating antennas (more than 120 feet [37 metres] in horizontal dimension), could reliably detect aircraft at very long ranges. Another notable development was the klystron amplifier, which provided a source of stable high power for very-long-range radars. Synthetic aperture radar first appeared in the early 1950s, but it took almost 30 more years to reach a high state of development, with the introduction of digital processing and other advances. The airborne pulse Doppler radar also was introduced in the late 1950s in the Bomarc air-to-air missile.

The decade of the 1950s also saw the publication of important theoretical concepts that helped put radar design on a more quantitative basis. These included the statistical theory of detection of signals in noise; the so-called matched filter theory, which showed how to configure a radar receiver to maximize detection of weak signals; the Woodward ambiguity diagram, which made clear the trade-offs in waveform design for good range and radial velocity measurement and resolution; and the basic methods for Doppler filtering in MTI radars, which later became important when digital technology allowed the theoretical concepts to become a practical reality.

The Doppler frequency shift and its utility for radar were known before World War II, but it took years of development to achieve the technology necessary for wide-scale adoption. Serious application of the Doppler principle to radar began in the 1950s, and today the principle has become vital in the operation of many radar systems. As previously explained, the Doppler frequency shift of the reflected signal results from the relative motion between the target and the radar. Use of the Doppler frequency is indispensable in continuous wave, MTI, and pulse Doppler radars, which must detect moving targets in the presence of large clutter echoes. The Doppler frequency shift is the basis for police radar guns. SAR and ISAR imaging radars make use of Doppler frequency to generate high-resolution images of terrain and targets. The Doppler frequency shift also has been used in Doppler-navigation radar to measure the velocity of the aircraft carrying the radar system. The extraction of the Doppler shift in weather radars, moreover, allows the identification of severe storms and dangerous wind shear not possible by other techniques.

The first large electronically steered phased-array radars were put into operation in the 1960s. Airborne MTI radar for aircraft detection was developed for the U.S. Navy’s Grumman E-2 airborne-early-warning (AEW) aircraft at this time. Many of the attributes of HF over-the-horizon radar were demonstrated during the 1960s, as were the first radars designed for detecting ballistic missiles and satellites.

Radar in the digital age
During the 1970s digital technology underwent a tremendous advance, which made practical the signal and data processing required for modern radar. Significant advances also were made in airborne pulse Doppler radar, greatly enhancing its ability to detect aircraft in the midst of heavy ground clutter. The U.S. Air Force’s airborne-warning-and-control-system (AWACS) radar and military airborne-intercept radar depend on the pulse Doppler principle. It might be noted too that radar began to be used in spacecraft for remote sensing of the environment during the 1970s.

Over the next decade radar methods evolved to a point where radars were able to distinguish one type of target from another. Serial production of phased-array radars for air defense (the Patriot and Aegis systems), airborne bomber radar (B-1B aircraft), and ballistic missile detection (Pave Paws) also became feasible during the 1980s. Advances in remote sensing made it possible to measure winds blowing over the sea, the geoid (or mean sea level), ocean roughness, ice conditions, and other environmental effects. Solid-state technology and integrated microwave circuitry permitted new radar capabilities that had been only academic curiosities a decade or two earlier.

Continued advances in computer technology in the 1990s allowed increased information about the nature of targets and the environment to be obtained from radar echoes. The introduction of Doppler weather radar systems (as, for example, Nexrad), which measure the radial component of wind speed as well as the rate of precipitation, provided new hazardous-weather warning capability. Terminal Doppler weather radars (TDWR) were installed at or near major airports to warn of dangerous wind shear during takeoff and landing. Unattended radar operation with little downtime for repairs was demanded of manufacturers for such applications as air traffic control. HF over-the-horizon radar systems were operated by several countries, primarily for the detection of aircraft at very long ranges (out to 2,000 nautical miles [3,700 km]). Space-based radars continued to gather information about the Earth’s land and sea surfaces on a global basis. Improved imaging radar systems were carried by space probes to obtain higher-resolution three-dimensional images of the surface of Venus, penetrating for the first time its ever-present opaque cloud cover.

The first ballistic missile defense radars were conceived and developed in the mid-1950s and 1960s. Development in the United States stopped, however, with the signing in 1972 of the antiballistic missile (ABM) treaty by the Soviet Union and the United States. The use of tactical ballistic missiles during the Persian Gulf War (1990–91) brought back the need for radars for defense against such missiles. Russia (and before that, the Soviet Union) continually enhanced its powerful radar-based air-defense systems to engage tactical ballistic missiles. The Israelis deployed the Arrow phased-array radar as part of an ABM system to defend their homeland. The United States developed a mobile active-aperture (all solid-state) phased-array called Theater High Altitude Area Defense Ground Based Radar (THAAD GBR) for use in a theatrewide ABM system.

Advances in digital technology in the first decade of the 21st century sparked further improvement in signal and data processing, with the goal of developing (almost) all-digital phased-array radars. High-power transmitters became available for radar application in the millimetre-wave portion of the spectrum (typically 94 GHz), with average powers 100 to 1,000 times greater than previously.
 
Top