1988 — Doppler Radar

The year was 1980’s something, well it was actually the year 1988 on the technology timeline when Doppler Radar came around. So what exactly is doppler radar?

History

In 1940’s the military used the effects of Doppler Radar as it is lightweight and reduces the heavy pulse hardware. Continuous-broadcast or FM was used during World War II for the USA Navy aircraft. They used this type of radar for nighttime operations in the combat zone.

The way they did this was to have a Yagi Antenna transmit to another Yagi Antenna on the wings of the planes so that the planes can fly at an optimum speed when approaching the ship targets and the lead or escort planes fire upon the enemy at night. This was known as semi-active radar homing.

Things got better as the time went on and the digital fast Fourier transform filtering when the modern microprocessors became an option in the 1970s

What is it used for

So what can you use Doppler Radar on there are four different technology that apply this

• Coherent pulsed
• Pulse-Doppler radar
• Continuous wave
• Frequency Modulation

The police use this to catch speeders, dang this radar use. They are used in the following places:
• Aviation
• Sounding satellites
• Major League Baseball’s StatCast system
• Meteorology
• Radar guns (as mentioned above)
• Radiology
• Health care (Fall Detection)
• Bistatic radar (surface-to-air missiles)

Meteorology

I have often heard this when they are talking about weather situations. You know here is the doppler radar information. They use the pulse-Doppler technique to look at the motion of the precipitation. This is only a portion or part of the processing of their data. (I wonder if this is why they are wrong 60% of the time)

Frequency variation

Let’s get into some math right now, I know math. In the following equation c will be the speed of lint and v is the target which gives the shifted frequency (f r) as a function of the original frequency (f t).

My Take on Doppler radar

No matter when this was invented or no matter what it is used for, should be banned for police use in catching speeders, just my opinion. But this is a massive break in technology in order to help planes arrive safe. Help the missiles out when fired to go where they are targeted. Help in the I have fallen and can’t get up. But, the weather reporting when they use the “Doppler Effect” It has helped in that area. This is a cool technology to have around.