Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey, they're and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
Speaker 1: podcast that looks at the future and says I was
Speaker 1: seriously thinking about hiding the receiver when the switch broke
Speaker 1: because it's old. I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1: And today we're going to be talking about radar, right
Speaker 1: and uh. And and just for our fans who are
Speaker 1: my age or older, we're not talking about the popular
Speaker 1: character from the movie and television series Mash unfortunately not.
Speaker 1: Now we're talking about the actual technology radar, which is
Speaker 1: nothing new. No, it's it's it's been around for quite
Speaker 1: a few decades. But it's super cool. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of different applications for it that are really interesting, and
Speaker 1: apparently there are going to be some new applications for
Speaker 1: it in the future. Yeah, and even if there is
Speaker 1: a future, well, it's on my radar. Uh, it's gonna happen.
Speaker 1: Might as well get it all the way early. The
Speaker 1: neat thing is the way that the technology is is
Speaker 1: changing over time. Like there it's being married with other technologies.
Speaker 1: But we'll get into that, Okay, Well, let me. Let
Speaker 1: me explore the layman's view of radar. What is radar
Speaker 1: If you don't know, it has something to do with
Speaker 1: a circular screen that has a line that sweeps around
Speaker 1: it and goes you've mistaken ever sonar? Oh no, wait,
Speaker 1: hold on, hold on. It has something to do with
Speaker 1: like a little antenna that spins around really fast. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's closer, and there can be around around screen.
Speaker 1: It's just the bloop is totally indicative of sonar ups
Speaker 1: as opposed to radar. You could make a radar display.
Speaker 1: Bloop could incredible. Future looking is one of the easiest
Speaker 1: things to program. Look, I've I've I've studied screenplays, and
Speaker 1: I realized that if you make it blue, you have
Speaker 1: confused your audience. So but no. The other interesting thing
Speaker 1: that we want to talk about before we actually get
Speaker 1: into what radar is now it works is the fact
Speaker 1: that it used to be an acronym and now it's
Speaker 1: not anymore. It's one of those words like laser, laser
Speaker 1: was like this wasn't it? Sure was? Yeah, so it
Speaker 1: used to be. It used to stand for something and
Speaker 1: won't stand. You could walk into them. The President of
Speaker 1: the United States could walk into our room. Radar is
Speaker 1: not gonna get up right, It's just like it's just
Speaker 1: a lowercase word. You don't even capitalize it. What did
Speaker 1: it originally stand for? Radio detection and ranging. That's what
Speaker 1: the United States Navy referred to it and the r
Speaker 1: A of radio were capitalized because it wasn't in the
Speaker 1: day when they would just add extra random words and there,
Speaker 1: and they didn't to make the really cool Yeah, they
Speaker 1: didn't want and they didn't want to call it nar. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so so turn on the dar. Yeah that did not
Speaker 1: That did not fly. So they went with radar. But
Speaker 1: today it's just radar. It's just a little lowercase word
Speaker 1: radar because we we say it so much, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean, boy, if I had a nickel for every
Speaker 1: time I talked about radar in your average week. Well,
Speaker 1: let's explain how radar actually works. It's actually a pretty
Speaker 1: simple principle. Yeah, it's actually very similar to echolocation, right,
Speaker 1: It's it's based on a very so and and in
Speaker 1: fact sonar it's it's based on similar principles, except in
Speaker 1: stuff of sound. We're talking about radio waves, which by
Speaker 1: the way, don't work so well underwater, but they were
Speaker 1: great above water. So, uh, Essentially, what you're doing is
Speaker 1: you're sending out bursts of radio waves or microwaves, like
Speaker 1: we're talking super short bursts, like microsecond long bursts. And
Speaker 1: you do that often whatever direction you're looking at, and
Speaker 1: if those waves encounter and object, some of them will
Speaker 1: bounce back towards the source of the transmission. So you've
Speaker 1: got to You've got transmitter and the receiver. You turn
Speaker 1: on the transmitter, you send out a blast of radio waves,
Speaker 1: you switch off the transmitter, you turn on the receiver,
Speaker 1: and when those returning waves come back one, you know
Speaker 1: that there's an object out there that the waves have encountered.
Speaker 1: And too, you know how far away it is because
Speaker 1: you can measure the time it took from when the
Speaker 1: radio waves went out of the antenna to when the
Speaker 1: echo came back in, and beyond that, you can actually
Speaker 1: tell whether or not the object is moving towards you
Speaker 1: or away from you using the Doppler shift, right, the
Speaker 1: Doppler effect that we're all familiar with from hearing police sirens. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so when you hear a police siren approaching you, it's
Speaker 1: it's getting this high pitch noise. It gets higher and
Speaker 1: higher and then after it passes you, you know that, yeah,
Speaker 1: suddenly gets lower, right, And the reason it does that
Speaker 1: the Doppler effect applies to all waves. It's not just
Speaker 1: sound waves, it's also radio waves. And what's happening is
Speaker 1: essentially those waves are being compressed ahead of the moving
Speaker 1: object when it's coming towards you, so the frequen s
Speaker 1: is increased. And when the frequency increases with sound, that
Speaker 1: means the pitch goes up right, And when the object
Speaker 1: passes by you, then the waves are being elongated. So
Speaker 1: now the pitch has decreased, it's gone down. And if
Speaker 1: you were standing right next to the to a stationary
Speaker 1: police vehicle while it was having the siren go off,
Speaker 1: it would sound in between those two well relatively speaking. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And in fact, you can even observe this with visible light,
Speaker 1: say like in astronomy, the disena moving away from us
Speaker 1: faster and faster in the galaxy or in the universe
Speaker 1: are going to be red shifted. Right. And in fact,
Speaker 1: also this is really part of what sonic booms. You know,
Speaker 1: why we have a sonic boom. If you're if you
Speaker 1: have an object that's moving faster than the speed of
Speaker 1: sound at whatever altitude you happen to be at. Because
Speaker 1: sound speed depends upon the medium it's traveling through, and
Speaker 1: with atmosphere, it could be affected by lots of stuff
Speaker 1: like humidity, the air density, the temperature, all that kind
Speaker 1: of thing. But anyway, if we're talking about something moving
Speaker 1: faster than the speed of sound, all of those sound
Speaker 1: waves get compressed so so flat that if you're in
Speaker 1: front of that object and it's coming towards you, you're
Speaker 1: not going to hear anything. You might, yeah, you might
Speaker 1: say what's that before it gets past you, And once
Speaker 1: it gets past you, then essentially all that sound is
Speaker 1: unleashed and a catch us up, glorious boom of fury
Speaker 1: and then and that's where the sonic boom comes in.
Speaker 1: And actually the sonic boom rolls along as long as
Speaker 1: the object continues to move faster than the speed of sound. Now,
Speaker 1: with radio waves, we don't get the sonic boom because
Speaker 1: we're talking about radio frequencies, we're not talking about acoustic waves.
Speaker 1: But what we can see is that if the frequency
Speaker 1: of the returning echo is greater than that what we
Speaker 1: than the frequency we sent out, then we know the
Speaker 1: object that we're looking at is moving toward us. If
Speaker 1: the frequency is less than what we sent out, we
Speaker 1: know the object is moving away from us. And by
Speaker 1: sending out series of these signals, we can tell in
Speaker 1: what direction and at what speed the object is moving exactly.
Speaker 1: And because each of these verses like a microsecond in length, here,
Speaker 1: you can you know, you can do this several times
Speaker 1: a minute, you know, depending upon what your system is
Speaker 1: looking for and uh and how you're focusing on that
Speaker 1: particular section of sky. Usually yeah, and so if I
Speaker 1: remember correctly, you'll probably be able to tell me mostly
Speaker 1: radar is going to be operating in the microwave frequency
Speaker 1: of the e M spectrum. That's that's largely what we
Speaker 1: see today. A lot of radio radar works in the microwaves,
Speaker 1: but it can't work in other other parts of the
Speaker 1: electromagnetic spectrum. And I think originally a lot of it
Speaker 1: was in radio. Yeah, right, so that would be yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So if you imagine the the e M spectrum, like
Speaker 1: you've got the longer wavelengths than visible light or microwaves,
Speaker 1: and then even longer than that or what we usually
Speaker 1: call radio waves. So yeah, and and the frequency would
Speaker 1: be you know, the greater the frequency, the greater the
Speaker 1: amount of information we can get back, which is why
Speaker 1: you want to use higher frequencies if you can. But
Speaker 1: we'll get into that later, which is part of why
Speaker 1: we talked so much about microwaves in another episode. We
Speaker 1: wait a minute, if you can get more information from
Speaker 1: higher frequency, why don't we just use gamma rays. Well,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of reasons why. One is that
Speaker 1: we don't want a lot of incredible hulks running around. Yeah. Well, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, honestly, obviously, gamma radiation would be inably dangerous,
Speaker 1: even if we could generate it easily without pouring tons
Speaker 1: of energy into whatever system we had created to make gama.
Speaker 1: That was my guess. Is just that it's harder to
Speaker 1: make and that it would also kill you. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: two combined are really good reasons why we don't go
Speaker 1: into it. Okay, Well, let's look back at the sort
Speaker 1: of the early days of radar, the juvenilia of radar,
Speaker 1: well back when radar was just a gleam in a
Speaker 1: bunch of engineers eyes. The you gotta look at the
Speaker 1: beginning of the twentieth century. So a lot of the
Speaker 1: groundwork was laid in the nineteenth century, where you had
Speaker 1: people discovering and experimenting with radio waves, but it wasn't
Speaker 1: until the early twentieth century that we started seeing people
Speaker 1: figure out, oh, we might be able to use this
Speaker 1: in order to detect things. Uh. There was an engineer
Speaker 1: in Christian hulls Meyer who invented a system that allowed
Speaker 1: ships or trains to avoid collisions on foggy days. Uh.
Speaker 1: The uh, the source I was reading, which was the
Speaker 1: APS Physics website, referred to it as crude. In other words,
Speaker 1: it was not a very refined system. Sure, but but
Speaker 1: you can immediately see or not see. Is the case?
Speaker 1: Maybe the benefit that radio waves have over electromagnetic light
Speaker 1: waves well sorry, visible spectrum, sure waves on a foggy day,
Speaker 1: because you can't see through fog, right, Yeah, you have
Speaker 1: radio waves can bounce right through if light is going
Speaker 1: to be reflected off the fog bank ahead of you,
Speaker 1: it doesn't. You can't really count on that being an
Speaker 1: effective signal to any other vehicles. So yeah, it was
Speaker 1: certainly something that was useful. The U. S. Navy had
Speaker 1: begun to a experiment with radar, although it wasn't called
Speaker 1: that at the time, to search for ships. But actually
Speaker 1: that research was largely overlooked in the United States, Like
Speaker 1: it was a group of researchers within the Navy that
Speaker 1: was doing a lot of this work, but because it
Speaker 1: was viewed as experimental, it wasn't thought of as particularly
Speaker 1: practical at that time. So it's kind of like they
Speaker 1: were left to do their own thing, and no one
Speaker 1: was really thinking it would ever come to anything. But
Speaker 1: that's amazing because it seems so clear to us now
Speaker 1: how useful something like radar is in warfare, Like you
Speaker 1: can have real time updates about the position of enemy
Speaker 1: vehicles in the moment, you know, as soon as they're
Speaker 1: advancing on you. You can see them in long distances well,
Speaker 1: especially things like aircraft, which would be particularly useful. And
Speaker 1: in fact, over in the UK research was going on,
Speaker 1: you know, in various places, but largely we have to
Speaker 1: thank Sir Robert Watson What, who was actually a descendant,
Speaker 1: a relative and distant relative of of the famous what
Speaker 1: What did all the steam engines at any rate? Uh So,
Speaker 1: Sir Robert Watson Watt began to work with radio waves
Speaker 1: um as a means of detecting aircraft, but first had
Speaker 1: been working in the Meteorological Office to develop systems to
Speaker 1: detect lightning strikes because lightning can give off radio waves.
Speaker 1: In fact, lightning strikes do give off radio waves, so
Speaker 1: if you have a detector, then you can start to
Speaker 1: detect thunderstorms, and that was considered to be very useful
Speaker 1: the UH, the United Kingdom at the time, wasn't really
Speaker 1: concerned with developing radio detection systems. But what happened was
Speaker 1: there was a rumor going around that the Germans had
Speaker 1: developed a death ray using radio waves, and so the
Speaker 1: UK government came to Watson. Watton said, if that's a thing,
Speaker 1: we're gonna need one of those. Can you even make
Speaker 1: one of those for us? And so he started looking
Speaker 1: into it, but very quickly he said, you know, there,
Speaker 1: this doesn't seem feasible at all from everything I've learned.
Speaker 1: That doesn't make sense. However, maybe we could focus on
Speaker 1: radio detection instead of radio destruction. And he really began
Speaker 1: to push for this means of using radio to bounce
Speaker 1: waves off of objects so that you can detect them remotely,
Speaker 1: and he got some support and it was very important
Speaker 1: in the UK at the time because we're talking about
Speaker 1: getting into World War two and the UK was heavily
Speaker 1: involved and obviously the fears of Germans German aircraft coming
Speaker 1: over and bombing England were warranted, so they the ability
Speaker 1: to get people out of an area when they saw
Speaker 1: when they saw craft coming huge absolutely necessary. Yeah. Funny
Speaker 1: side note to this, This is actually sort of related
Speaker 1: to the myth that carrots give you super eyesight. Did
Speaker 1: you know this? I wrote a brain Stuff episode about this.
Speaker 1: It's a fascinating little historical blip. So yeah, Apparently one
Speaker 1: of the reasons that the British Royal Air Force was
Speaker 1: pretty successful in repelling UH access air raids against the
Speaker 1: British was that they had on board radar. So like
Speaker 1: these these planes were equipped with you know, radar systems
Speaker 1: that could tell them when enemy aircraft were approaching from
Speaker 1: a very long distance. But of course they didn't want
Speaker 1: to let onto anything like that, so part of their
Speaker 1: misinformation campaign. Yeah, well, I think that's one theory. Other
Speaker 1: people have different explanations for why they said this, but
Speaker 1: for whatever reason, the British government said, you know, the
Speaker 1: reason our pilots can see so well is because they
Speaker 1: eat lots of vegetables rich in vitamin A like carrots.
Speaker 1: So at the same time, of course they were trying
Speaker 1: to get people to eat carrots because that was like
Speaker 1: one of the you know, one of the foods, one
Speaker 1: of the few foods that was plentiful in England at
Speaker 1: the time, to and to grow victory gardens quote unquote
Speaker 1: victory gardens that in which carrots were quite easy to grow. Right,
Speaker 1: that's interesting, Yeah, oh well, you know, but so it
Speaker 1: turns out it was a lie, you know, the pilots
Speaker 1: suggesting that they just had super keen eye sight. At
Speaker 1: the same time, vitamin A is very important for maintaining normal,
Speaker 1: healthy eye sight. So so we eat your carrots, kid. Well. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: going back over to the United States, during the same time,
Speaker 1: the Navy continued to develop radar and in fact named
Speaker 1: it such, creating the first US radar and it was
Speaker 1: called the x A F. It was installed on the
Speaker 1: U s S New York battleship in nineteen thirty nine.
Speaker 1: So obviously the earliest uses of radar were in military applications,
Speaker 1: and that's not a huge surprise, I mean it was
Speaker 1: that was where it was very much useful. But shortly thereafter,
Speaker 1: once the war ended, we started to see radar get
Speaker 1: used in lots of different applications, including a lot of
Speaker 1: commercial ones, so air traffic control aboard aircraft itself, like
Speaker 1: like you were saying jokes for commercial aircraft, not just um,
Speaker 1: military aircraft also uh, commercial ships, UM and other means
Speaker 1: as well. And and of course going back to what
Speaker 1: Watson Watt was originally studying, we began using it for
Speaker 1: weather detection, yeah, and forecasting. And this is uh, you know,
Speaker 1: like Doppler radar. You hear it all the time, especially
Speaker 1: here in Atlanta. Again they're so proud of their Doppler
Speaker 1: radar UM, but yeah, it's Doppler radar. Is is using
Speaker 1: the Doppler chef to detect moving weather patterns. And honestly,
Speaker 1: what they're mostly looking at is precipitation. So you know,
Speaker 1: the radar, the radio waves or microwaves will bounce back
Speaker 1: from precipitation telling you, oh, well there's a front moving
Speaker 1: in and we can keep track of it. We can
Speaker 1: even map out the shape of it. And so when
Speaker 1: you see the radar imagery that's based off the data
Speaker 1: that's coming back from that, that uh the signals which
Speaker 1: is pretty cool. Uh. The radar transmitters for Doppler radar
Speaker 1: for weather are pretty powerful. They use food watts of
Speaker 1: electricity when they're blasting out signals. I gotta be honest,
Speaker 1: I have no idea how much that is. A regular
Speaker 1: microwave oven is one thousand watts, So multiply a regular
Speaker 1: microwave oven four fifty times and you get what. But however,
Speaker 1: this particular radar technology isn't used, you know, It's not
Speaker 1: like they turn it on and it's blasting out radio
Speaker 1: waves for like hours at a time, right right, It's
Speaker 1: it's more like defrost mode on your microwave where it
Speaker 1: sends out kind of little blips and and then collects them.
Speaker 1: All right, It's it's to get a composite. It's spending
Speaker 1: most of its time listening rather than blasting. So it'll
Speaker 1: send out a blast of radio waves in a very
Speaker 1: short amount of time of fraction of a second, and
Speaker 1: then it listens for a good long while for the
Speaker 1: echoes to come back. So we're talking about um such
Speaker 1: a short amount of time that the source I've read
Speaker 1: said it transmits for about seven seconds in a typical hour.
Speaker 1: So it sounds like if they just leave this thing on,
Speaker 1: the army could have the death ray they wanted. Well,
Speaker 1: they could at least drain the power grid nothing else. Uh,
Speaker 1: I don't know that it would necessarily do anything else besides, um,
Speaker 1: you know it could it could probably jam communications with
Speaker 1: that many radio waves going out, but that'd be about it. Well.
Speaker 1: I mean, we used to think about radar as this
Speaker 1: kind of like high tech, expensive military technology, and it
Speaker 1: used to be that. Yeah, but but now you see
Speaker 1: it all over the place, right Yeah. Now it's actually
Speaker 1: making its way into consumer technology. So I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: it's not going to be in your smartphone, but it
Speaker 1: might be in your car yet. Yeah. So autonomous cars
Speaker 1: obviously need to have a lot of of sensors, right
Speaker 1: in order to to note what is in their particular
Speaker 1: neighborhood so that they know, you know, whether they can
Speaker 1: merge over, change lanes, speed up, slow down, that kind
Speaker 1: of thing, right, And you can use different kinds of
Speaker 1: waves to do this. For example, one thing we've seen
Speaker 1: employed a lot in autonomous cars is lidar, yeah, which
Speaker 1: is you know, it's laser oriented as opposed to using
Speaker 1: radio frequencies. But radar is also used. Uh. There are
Speaker 1: lots of different systems where radar is used to maintain
Speaker 1: a safe distance between the vehicle, the vehicle itself and
Speaker 1: any vehicles around it. So you know, like the rule
Speaker 1: of thomb being that if you're behind a vehicle, you
Speaker 1: should be able to count to three uh when it
Speaker 1: passes a landmark before you pass that landmark to Well,
Speaker 1: these kind of systems will make sure you maintain that
Speaker 1: safe distance at whatever operating speed the vehicle happens to
Speaker 1: be at. So yeah, and I think you you talk,
Speaker 1: you go into a little bit more detail about that
Speaker 1: one in the video version, yeah, our radar episode, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I specifically talk about dynamic cruise control, which is something
Speaker 1: that's kind of a it's like a stepping stone between
Speaker 1: the cars we have now and truly autonomous cars and
Speaker 1: a lot of vehicles right now have dynamic cruise control UM.
Speaker 1: And the basic principle is that you set the cruising
Speaker 1: speed of your vehicle, but it also has this radar
Speaker 1: system so it can maintain the proper distance between any
Speaker 1: cars in front of it, and if it starts to
Speaker 1: get past a certain threshold of safety, the system will
Speaker 1: automatically apply the brakes to slow down your vehicle, but
Speaker 1: you'll still be in cruise control so you don't have
Speaker 1: to hit Yeah, you don't have to hit a break
Speaker 1: or an accelerator to turn it off. You can just
Speaker 1: let it keep going. And you know, if traffic starts
Speaker 1: picking up, then obviously you would take it off of
Speaker 1: cruise control, but otherwise you just let it go. I
Speaker 1: think this is an interesting application of radar because if
Speaker 1: you look back at the history of it, what it
Speaker 1: was originally great for was seeing stuff that is very
Speaker 1: far away. You know, it's sort of like extending our
Speaker 1: vision beyond where we could where we can naturally ever
Speaker 1: hope to sense with our puny, little human senses. But
Speaker 1: now it's more about having cheap, controllable, short range options.
Speaker 1: Oh sure, especially in that consumer space, right Uh, seeing
Speaker 1: any kind of technology mature, we we tend to see
Speaker 1: this kind of approach, this kind of a pathway. You know,
Speaker 1: some technologies probably won't ever follow that pathway, just because
Speaker 1: either they'll never get inexpensive enough or there's not a
Speaker 1: practical consumer application for them. But this is one case
Speaker 1: where there is a practical application, So that's pretty cool.
Speaker 1: But there are other practical applications that are go a
Speaker 1: little beyond being in your vehicle, yeah, less on the
Speaker 1: consumer end. Other other cool stuff is happening in radar,
Speaker 1: for example, radar in space. Fu um so starting background,
Speaker 1: NASA in the e s A had teamed up and
Speaker 1: began launching synthetic aperture radar devices into orbit. Are we
Speaker 1: sure this isn't from portal? No? No, no, synthetic aperture. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're like synthetic aperture telescopes. It's a. It's a it's
Speaker 1: a yeah. Yeah, it's totally think it's a really cool thing. Uh.
Speaker 1: Synthetic aperture means that the radar equipment is on a
Speaker 1: moving vehicle, which, to simplify the science ridiculously like almost criminally,
Speaker 1: means that the aperture of the antenna can be as
Speaker 1: long as the vehicle's flight path. And let me let
Speaker 1: me explain that a little bit, because it makes absolutely
Speaker 1: no sense the way I just said it. Okay, picture
Speaker 1: a dish antenna, right, It's aperture is its diameter. Okay. Uh,
Speaker 1: the greater the size of the dish, and that's the
Speaker 1: greater the size of the aperture, the more data the
Speaker 1: dish can take in. Uh, Thus the finer the resolution
Speaker 1: of the final image that it creates. It's similar to
Speaker 1: how film cameras work. You know, like if you've got
Speaker 1: a wider lens aperture, more light can come in and
Speaker 1: you can take a higher resolution photograph. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: one reason we can't say, resolve images of things that
Speaker 1: are really, really really far away. We just can't build
Speaker 1: telescopes with an aperture wide enough. Right. If you if
Speaker 1: you could imagine like in you know, infinitely large aperture,
Speaker 1: you could technically probably resolve almost anything out there. But
Speaker 1: this is totally like the yes, now zoom in. No,
Speaker 1: it doesn't always work like that. Zoom and enhanced zoom right,
Speaker 1: zoom and enhanced. Yeah, yeah, we usually zoom in. But
Speaker 1: it seems like it'd be impossible to build something that
Speaker 1: had a physical aperture that big, right. And you know,
Speaker 1: if you put an antenna on a vehicle like an
Speaker 1: airplane or satellite, it means that you're limiting the physical
Speaker 1: size of the antenna to what that craft can carry.
Speaker 1: But by putting the vehicle in motion and including a
Speaker 1: whole lot of processing capacity, the flight of the vehicle
Speaker 1: can act like the total aperture of the antenna. Wow,
Speaker 1: it's kind of crazy. Yeah, So it's like a virtue
Speaker 1: I got Oh now I got the virtual aperture. Okay,
Speaker 1: it's like it's like exactly what you called it earlier
Speaker 1: on Synthetic said synthetic. UM and and this is really
Speaker 1: cool physically just in terms of the pure science of it,
Speaker 1: but it's all so awesomely practical. For example, it's used
Speaker 1: currently to monitor situations like where to natural environments and
Speaker 1: and damage done in disasters and illegal logging and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. UH and researchers are also looking at ways
Speaker 1: to bend it to even more different kinds of work,
Speaker 1: like like structural monitoring of infrastructure that the tech can
Speaker 1: detect movements of mere millimeters, so it can look for
Speaker 1: problems in in places that no human person might go
Speaker 1: out to for you know, however long it takes to
Speaker 1: send someone out there. Yeah, I've actually seen this used
Speaker 1: in UH in mapping features as well, in order to
Speaker 1: do topographical mapping that kind of thing. Uh And in fact,
Speaker 1: the image I saw was of Florida, and it was
Speaker 1: amazing the amount of resolution there. UM Another really cool
Speaker 1: thing that we're seeing, and it involves a space agency,
Speaker 1: but not a space application. NASA and the Department of
Speaker 1: Homeland Security partnered in an initiative called Finding Individuals for
Speaker 1: Disaster and I'm urgency Response or Finder, and it's a
Speaker 1: low powered microwave radar that looks it's it's used by
Speaker 1: rescue workers who are looking for survivors in the wake
Speaker 1: of a disaster, and recently it was used in the
Speaker 1: wake of the massive earthquake in Nepal. So obviously there
Speaker 1: was a huge tragedy and a lot of people went
Speaker 1: to try and help and one of the groups had
Speaker 1: this this low power microwave radar, and it can actually
Speaker 1: detect survivors by detecting their heartbeats. They're using radar to
Speaker 1: detect heartbeats through rubble, like up to thirty ft of
Speaker 1: rubble or twenty feet of concrete or a hundred feet
Speaker 1: of open space, and the fluctuations of the heartbeat or
Speaker 1: the fluctuations of your chest just from breathing are enough
Speaker 1: for the radar to pick up the difference, the differences
Speaker 1: in that Doppler shift and tell the rescuers there's somebody
Speaker 1: down there, which is pretty phenomenal. So you know, we've
Speaker 1: covered radar looking at whether we looked at radar looking
Speaker 1: at massive areas of the Earth and also just radar
Speaker 1: looking for a single person in rubble, which is pretty
Speaker 1: amazing to me. But so uh, these are all current
Speaker 1: applications of radar. What about the future? Oh, I got it,
Speaker 1: I got it, radar, home cooking appliances like a radar
Speaker 1: Panini press radar. No, okay, never mind, Lauren, what's the
Speaker 1: future of radar? Well, Joe, Uh, sorry, sorry to tell you,
Speaker 1: there are no Panini presses that I'm personally aware of
Speaker 1: in the works using radar. But uh, Modular radar is
Speaker 1: a thing that of few research and development firms are
Speaker 1: working on. See right now. Radar systems mostly have to
Speaker 1: be custom designed for any given application. Um Now, I
Speaker 1: will say a key feature of modern military radar at
Speaker 1: any rate is the use of a ray of transmitters,
Speaker 1: which allow the capacity to broadcast multiple beams that work
Speaker 1: in tandem to cover a greater range um and also
Speaker 1: help escape signal detection by other parties, which is pretty cool. So, so,
Speaker 1: you know, if you're talking about extra bits that you
Speaker 1: add to radar, you could say that an array is
Speaker 1: sort of modular in a way, but that's not what
Speaker 1: I'm talking about. So you mean just modular by like
Speaker 1: adding parts like lots of little little bits that you
Speaker 1: add together. Well see there. There are also definitely systems
Speaker 1: for building your own um necessary power and type of
Speaker 1: radar using interchangeable parts on a on a on a
Speaker 1: base kind of unit um but as far as I
Speaker 1: can tell, it wasn't until the two thousands that patents
Speaker 1: began appearing for something closer to to like plug and
Speaker 1: play modular radar, wherein each unit is the same and
Speaker 1: can can interact with other units to adapt to particular
Speaker 1: tax asks. So instead of having to commission a a new,
Speaker 1: uh customized radar system for whatever application you have in mind,
Speaker 1: you could go back to this basic modular approach and
Speaker 1: build it from that, which I would imagine dramatically decreases
Speaker 1: the cost. Yeah. Yeah, you can just order rather than
Speaker 1: having to order an entire system, or even an entire
Speaker 1: system that you can kind of customize, you can just
Speaker 1: order a certain number of these units and they'll wind
Speaker 1: up working together. That the Navy, via contract with Raytheon,
Speaker 1: has been developing the scalable radar system that The building
Speaker 1: blocks of these systems are called radar modular assemblies, and
Speaker 1: each unit is a two foot square block that contains
Speaker 1: everything it needs to function alone, but when grouped together
Speaker 1: their power is multiplicative, which is so cool. Uh. This
Speaker 1: is meant to replace the Spy one radar, which is
Speaker 1: currently in use on naval ships UM, which supports air
Speaker 1: defense and weather data collection and ballistic missile defense and
Speaker 1: can help counter other forces search and track capacity. So
Speaker 1: good stuff all, um, But nine of these modular suckers
Speaker 1: could replace the Spy one, which is about twice as
Speaker 1: large as as this array of modular things would be
Speaker 1: being a twelve ft octagon. Just by one is a
Speaker 1: twelve ft octagon? Is it is an octagon? Yes, because
Speaker 1: apparently we are living in Battlestar Galactica, either that or
Speaker 1: the UFC. You know, ray Theon really sounds like it
Speaker 1: should be the name of a house and Game of
Speaker 1: Thrones totally trying to figure out how to do that joke,
Speaker 1: thank you, but I can't argue with that. But so,
Speaker 1: so that's so that's nine of these modular units. If
Speaker 1: you go up to thirty seven units, Raytheon says that
Speaker 1: you can find a target half the size at twice
Speaker 1: the range of a Spy one. And if you've got
Speaker 1: sixty nine of the units, you could find a target
Speaker 1: half the size at nearly four times the range um
Speaker 1: or you know, if you wanted to, you could just
Speaker 1: stick a single unit on a smaller vehicle. Uh. The
Speaker 1: system is set for release in two sixteen, and as
Speaker 1: of like today, which is May. Uh. Raython says that
Speaker 1: the system has passed an internal and naval critical design review,
Speaker 1: So it's moving forward, y'all. Radar is coming. I want
Speaker 1: to hum so badly right now, tell us more, Laura,
Speaker 1: I shall, I shall. Northrop Gremman, who was also in
Speaker 1: competition for the Navy's contract on these modular units, seems
Speaker 1: to be working on a vaguely similar system for the
Speaker 1: Air Force UM and hey, you know, this sort of
Speaker 1: thing would be also great for smaller, perhaps commercial applications
Speaker 1: like running security on campuses and on streets and in shipyards,
Speaker 1: a special using frequencies that can penetrate precipitation and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. So all of this is thanks you know,
Speaker 1: to technological advances in in both receiver and transmitter technology,
Speaker 1: but also to lots of other tech that we've talked
Speaker 1: about on the show before, like like modular robotic research
Speaker 1: and semiconductor research and software and algorithmic improvements. So it's
Speaker 1: how it's it's it's fascinating seeing all of these industries
Speaker 1: coming together to create these relatively easy to use products
Speaker 1: that can be used in so many ways. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think that's uh I I had no idea about this,
Speaker 1: and this is interesting. That's another application of the sort
Speaker 1: of like modular principle like we talked about in the
Speaker 1: Modular Robotics episode. I like this idea of lots of
Speaker 1: little minions that come together to become something greater. Okay, well,
Speaker 1: you know, and some of the other stuff that we
Speaker 1: need to talk about are some of the challenges that
Speaker 1: come along with radar. And one of the big ones
Speaker 1: is that you know, you've got a transmitter and risk
Speaker 1: either your receiver is essentially a giant antenna that's trying
Speaker 1: to pick up very faint signals. Sure, but the more
Speaker 1: sensitive your receiver is, obviously the more junk it's gonna
Speaker 1: pick up. That's that's a real issue, right, how do
Speaker 1: you tell the stuff you want from all the junk
Speaker 1: that you're getting as well? So in other words, like
Speaker 1: you're trying to find out whether or not you know,
Speaker 1: a stealth vehicle is flying overhead, but all you're picking
Speaker 1: up is the Zoo Cruise radio show. Uh, you know
Speaker 1: that's that's three miles down the road. Uh. That's obviously
Speaker 1: for for the sake of levity, but really, I mean
Speaker 1: there is this problem of how do you separate the
Speaker 1: signal from the noise? And you know, depending upon the
Speaker 1: application you're using, it may not be that big of
Speaker 1: a deal. It may be pretty simple. But the more
Speaker 1: refined you get, the more difficult it becomes to make
Speaker 1: this separation. So let's say that you're using a microwave
Speaker 1: UH radar system and you want to have a very
Speaker 1: high resolution of the data that you're getting back. That's
Speaker 1: actually pretty challenging. Uh. And there is a team of
Speaker 1: researchers in Italy who have been trying to make it
Speaker 1: easier using a photonics system. Now, photonics, if if you
Speaker 1: break down the word, you you know that obviously it
Speaker 1: has to do with light. It's some sort of optical system.
Speaker 1: They're actually using lasers and photonic diodes in order to
Speaker 1: generate radio frequencies. And the reason they're doing it is
Speaker 1: because if you're using a like traditional radar system, you
Speaker 1: typically begin with an analog signal. Then you have to
Speaker 1: convert that analog signal into a digital signal, So use
Speaker 1: a converter to convert it to digital, and then you
Speaker 1: want to blast that out as your as your means
Speaker 1: of trying to detect stuff. But you also want to
Speaker 1: use a very high frequency if you can, because that's
Speaker 1: where you're going to get the higher resolution data back.
Speaker 1: But this approach is usually limited too, limited to around
Speaker 1: two giga hurts and frequency. If you want to go
Speaker 1: beyond that, you have to put that signal through what's
Speaker 1: called an up converter. It's essentially boosting the signal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we can do that, and you can boost the signal
Speaker 1: and send it out and when it comes back, now
Speaker 1: you've got to read it, and you can't read it
Speaker 1: and it's in that up converted format. You actually have
Speaker 1: to run it through down conversion so that you can
Speaker 1: read this signal. And the problem is every single step
Speaker 1: in that process, from changing the analog to digital to
Speaker 1: up conversion to down conversion can introduce more noise, meaning
Speaker 1: that whatever you're getting back is getting harder and harder
Speaker 1: to actually analyze. So the photonic system gets around that
Speaker 1: by using this uh this optics system to generate those
Speaker 1: radio frequencies, and the researchers say they can do a
Speaker 1: much broader range of frequencies, including much higher frequencies than
Speaker 1: any other system can make at the moment, and do
Speaker 1: it in a much more stable way that they don't.
Speaker 1: It's not got. It doesn't have this problem of introducing noise,
Speaker 1: and they don't have to down convert the returning echoing
Speaker 1: signal in order to analyze it because they're using the
Speaker 1: same system to generate and receive the messages. They've even
Speaker 1: said that you could switch this to a communications system
Speaker 1: if you needed to, So not only would it become
Speaker 1: a transmitter and receiver for radar, but it could become
Speaker 1: a communications device where you could communicate with other stations. Um,
Speaker 1: so pretty cool. They call it POE dear p h
Speaker 1: O d I R and uh. They build a prototype
Speaker 1: device and it worked, so they're now working on turning
Speaker 1: it into more of a practical tool, because there's a
Speaker 1: big difference between a prototype and something that would actually
Speaker 1: work for anybody, of course, of course, yeah, but pretty yeah,
Speaker 1: just everything today sounds like a Game of Thrones character
Speaker 1: right that. Yeah, okay, so so what are some other
Speaker 1: problems that we need to solve in in radar technology. Well,
Speaker 1: a similar one to what we just mentioned is that
Speaker 1: the returning echoes can be very, very faint, particularly if
Speaker 1: we're looking at something that does not want to be found,
Speaker 1: like a stealth plane. So you know stealth planes. The
Speaker 1: reason why their stealth is not it's not that they're
Speaker 1: hard to see. They're usually pretty easy to see when
Speaker 1: they're on the ground. It's that they're hard to detect. Right.
Speaker 1: Their surfaces are designed so that they disperse incoming radio
Speaker 1: waves so that they don't reflect back to the the
Speaker 1: point of origin. So it makes it much harder to
Speaker 1: detect with a radar station. So now people are saying, well,
Speaker 1: how can we detect it? You know, some of the
Speaker 1: radio waves do get reflected back, but they're usually so faint.
Speaker 1: There's so few of them that it is hard to
Speaker 1: to say that's an actual hit versus a false positive
Speaker 1: or noise random noise. So some researchers at the University
Speaker 1: of York came up with a clever way of improving
Speaker 1: the sensitivity of radar receivers using our old buddy quantum physics.
Speaker 1: Oh Joe, I, since you have some uncertain to you
Speaker 1: about physics. Okay, that was your third pun for the episode.
Speaker 1: It was also the second time i've I've referred to
Speaker 1: that joke, because I did that in the video episode two.
Speaker 1: But anyway, although I don't know if they may have
Speaker 1: cut that, the video episode hasn't got live yet, so
Speaker 1: um at any rate. So the way that they're using
Speaker 1: quantum physics is through entanglement, quantum entanglement, and we've talked
Speaker 1: about that on this show before, but generally speaking, uh,
Speaker 1: this gets this gets pretty complicated. We're gonna use the
Speaker 1: super simplified way of saying it. Quantum entangled entanglement involves
Speaker 1: coupling two particles or waves in such a way that
Speaker 1: their states complement each other. So if we think of
Speaker 1: it in photons, we usually talk about or or electrons.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about electrons, you know, usually talk about electron spin.
Speaker 1: So if one electron is spinning up, the other electron
Speaker 1: is spinning down, and they are coupled this way, no
Speaker 1: matter how far apart, you may move the two particles,
Speaker 1: as long as you don't make the system collapse on itself,
Speaker 1: in which case the the tanglement ends and they no
Speaker 1: longer ares Yeah, they have nothing to do with each other.
Speaker 1: So another way of putting it is that if you
Speaker 1: know something about one of these particles, you know something
Speaker 1: about the other one right at that moment in any rate. Yes,
Speaker 1: So in this case they are coupling a microwave beam
Speaker 1: with an optical beam. And the way this works is
Speaker 1: the optical beam is more or less contained within the
Speaker 1: radar system itself. There is some detection that goes with that,
Speaker 1: but it gets way too complicated for me to understand,
Speaker 1: let alone describe. So to simplify it, the optical beam
Speaker 1: is contained within the system. The microwave beam is used
Speaker 1: to beam out at wherever direction you're looking at. When
Speaker 1: returning microwaves come back in, you can compare those echoes
Speaker 1: against the optical beams. The optical beam acts like a reference,
Speaker 1: and because the two were entangled, there's going to be
Speaker 1: certain points where they correlate. If in fact, that is
Speaker 1: the same microwave beam you beamed out in the first place,
Speaker 1: and that would tell you, yes, there is in fact
Speaker 1: something there, because these are the same beams you sent
Speaker 1: out in the first place. And you could be sure
Speaker 1: of that because the odds of these two different beams
Speaker 1: matching up randomly are so astronomical as to be unthinkable.
Speaker 1: So in other words, if you send it out and
Speaker 1: you get a very faint reading, you might say, ah,
Speaker 1: I think there's a stealth vehicle flying toward us based
Speaker 1: upon this reading. And the only reason we can be
Speaker 1: sure is because it the the qualities of this microwave
Speaker 1: beam reflect the qualities of the optical beam that are
Speaker 1: already in the system because they were a coupled together earlier,
Speaker 1: which is pretty amazing stuff. It blew my mind when
Speaker 1: I read into it, because, uh, you know, I didn't
Speaker 1: even think about the possibility of entangling two very different things,
Speaker 1: an optical beam and well, I mean, obviously they're both
Speaker 1: electro magnetic radiation, but you don't really associate them together, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, the only time I associate microwaves in light
Speaker 1: or when I opened up the microwave door in the
Speaker 1: little comes on. Otherwise it doesn't happen. It's a different
Speaker 1: kind of entangled. Yes, as I have often been entangled
Speaker 1: with microwaves, but that's more of a core issue. Yeah.
Speaker 1: At any rate, I thought it was really cool to
Speaker 1: see kind of this emerging technological development, and you know,
Speaker 1: even this this system of radar, which you wouldn't really
Speaker 1: necessarily think has evolved that much since it was first
Speaker 1: uh you know, designed and engineered. You would figure, oh, well,
Speaker 1: that's a very basic principle. I don't. I could see
Speaker 1: where we could get better and better at detecting it,
Speaker 1: but how do we go beyond that? It's pretty amazing,
Speaker 1: I think, and when you get whenever you get to
Speaker 1: the point where you're incorporating quantum mechanics, and it really
Speaker 1: gets pretty uh heavy in my book. So at any rate,
Speaker 1: this was really fun to talk about. It was an
Speaker 1: interesting kind of thing that we didn't hadn't really considered before.
Speaker 1: But if you guys out there in listener land have
Speaker 1: suggestions for topics we should cover in the future, keep
Speaker 1: sending those emails were We're accumulating them, we're addressing them,
Speaker 1: we're uh doing more and more listener oriented episodes, and
Speaker 1: we love hearing from you guys. Maybe you have a question,
Speaker 1: maybe you have a suggestion I'd loved, or maybe even
Speaker 1: you've worked with radar and you want to tell us
Speaker 1: about your experiences. We'd love to hear from you. The
Speaker 1: email address is FW thinking at how Stuff Works dot com,
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