[chbot] [OT} over the horizon radar, the woodpecker

[Helmut Walle]

Interesting... so that's what I heard back in Europe ages ago. I was 
never enough of a radio nerd to really want to know where the noise came 
from.

This also explains why the Chernobyl power station was required in the 
first place (-: It still seems like an odd approach to the problem with 
somewhat limited effectiveness - while I can see how this technique 
could be used to detect ballistic missiles, it probably would be less 
useful for picking up cruise missiles (just trying to get back on topic 
for the robotics group here...) that travel so slowly that they just 
look like small planes on any radar (if you can pick them up at all 
using radar, which is a challenge because they travel only a few meters 
above the ground, so that this array might not even pick them up at 
all). This is obviously one of the reasons for developing the AWACS 
system that uses a sophisticated radar system looking down from a plane 
and can detect pretty much anything that moves beneath it, as long as it 
returns a radar echo and travels on or above the ground. In the early 
days of AWACS in Europe, they picked up some cars on the German 
Autobahn, apparently as they had set the speed threshold for identifying 
something as a plane or cruise missile a bit low based on the US 
expectation of a 55-mph speed limit, plus whatever margin they had 
allowed for idiots (probably not enough when working over a country that 
is full of petrolheads and has no speed limits on some roads...)

The US were also operating huge over-the horizon radars during cold war 
times - did they also cause that much interference to other radio 
applications?

Kind regards,

Helmut.

On 01/08/15 09:20, Mark Atherton wrote:
> mainly of interest to the older, northern hemisphere radio ham.
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbi6eoh63ZQ
>
> So that is what made the infernal noise...
>
> -mark
>