Investigation Of Computer Techniques For Radar Land Mass Simulation PDF Download

A study of the extent to which digital computing techniques may afford improved performance in the realtime simulation of airborne radars is reported. It is desired to reproduce the display presented by a scanning, groundmapping radar, having a range in the order of 200 miles and a resolution in the order of 60 points per mile. The simulated radar is mounted in an aircraft that flies at a maximu speed of Mach 3 at any altitude up to 10 miles, the flight plan not known to the simlator in advance. While a cursory examination of such requirements indicates that a straight-forward digital computer simulation of the display waveform would require exorbitant memory sizes and tremendous computational speeds, many factors can be used to advantage, in order to reduce the computational complexity to economically manageable proportions. Redundancy in the terrain itself implies that the height and reflectivity observed by the radar are not purely random functions; their consistency or predictability can be shown to significantly reduce the information-handling capacity of a simulator. (Author).