On Friday 27 February 2004 14:02, David Megginson wrote: > Erik Hofman wrote: > > Modified Files: > > radar_misc.rgb > > Log Message: > > Add support for a storm blib > > Excellent. > > As far as I know, civilian airliners carry radar that is capable only of > detecting weather, not small things like aircraft. They also use a > separate radar system for ground separation (the radar altimeter). For > traffic, they use TCAS, which is equivalent to secondary surveillance radar > (i.e. it detects other planes only if their transponders are on, and does > not pick up primary targets). > > I'm sure that some of the very newest airliners can integrate all of this > information into a single multifunction display, but for most of the > existing fleet, I don't know if traffic and weather would appear on the > same display or not. Can anyone chime in with concrete information? > > I'm sure that military combat aircraft must have radar with primary traffic > capability, since the enemy is sometimes too inconsiderate to turn on the > transponder. > > > All the best, > > > David
Yeah - lots of modes, from narrow angle boresight to vertical & horizontal cross-scans, different doppler stuff for crossing the scan and approaching it... and that's just air-to-air. More and different doppler stuff for look-down A2A, not to mention ground mapping stuff. Trend these days is more for passive optical stuff, both A2A & A2G. Afaik, IR's better for initial acquisition - it's longer lived and so gives a bigger target, but you want to switch to visible as soon as you detect some contrast. Need active lasers for ranging though, I think. Funnily enough, while should be relatively easy to kludge, it seems a bit pointless to me... LeeE _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
