Tag Archives: Radar

Ground Penetrating Radar For The Masses

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Radar is a useful tool with familiar uses such as detecting aircraft and observing weather. It also has some less known applications, such as a technology known as ground-penetrating radar (GPR). Despite the difficulty of sending and receiving radio waves through solid objects, with the right equipment it’s possible to build a radar that works underground as well.

GPR is used often for detecting underground utilities, but also has applications in other fields such as archaeology and geology. For those people in these fields, a less expensive GPR was the priority of a group presenting at a 2017 National Institute …read more

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NASA Discovered a ‘Disturbing’ Glacier Hole Two-Thirds the Size of Manhattan

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A new study from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory found that 14 billion tons of ice have almost entirely disappeared from Thwaites Glacier in the last three years. Continue reading NASA Discovered a ‘Disturbing’ Glacier Hole Two-Thirds the Size of Manhattan→

Hacker History III: Professional Hardware Hacker

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Following on from my C64 hacking days, but in parallel to my BBS Hacking, this final part looks at my early hardware hacking and creation of a new class of meteorological research radar…
Ever since that first C64 and through the x86 years, I’d … Continue reading Hacker History III: Professional Hardware Hacker→

Ask Hackaday: How Would You Detect A Marauding Drone?

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The last few days have seen drone stories in the news, as London’s Gatwick airport remained closed for a couple of days amid a spate of drone reports. The police remained baffled, arrested a couple who turned out to be blameless, and finally admitted that there was a possibility the drone could not have existed at all. It emerged that a problem with the investigation lay in there being no means to detect a drone beyond the eyesight of people on the ground, and as we have explored in these pages already, eyewitness reports are not always trustworthy.

Radar Can’t

…read more

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Jeremy Hong: Weaponizing the Radio Spectrum

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Jeremy Hong knows a secret or two about things you shouldn’t do with radio frequency (RF), but he’s not sharing.

That seems an odd foundation upon which to build one’s 2018 Hackaday Superconference talk, but it’s for good reason. Jeremy knows how to do things like build GPS and radar jammers, which are federal crimes. Even he hasn’t put his knowledge to practical use, having built only devices that never actually emitted any RF.

So what does one talk about when circumspection is the order of the day? As it turns out, quite a lot. Jeremy focused on how the …read more

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SDR Is At the Heart of This Soup-Can Doppler Radar Set

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Want to explore the world of radar by feel daunted by the mysteries of radio frequency electronics? Be daunted no more and abstract the RF complexities away with this tutorial on software-defined radar.

Taking inspiration from our own [Gregory L. Charvat], whose many radar projects have graced our pages before, [Luigi Freitas]’ plunge into radar is spare on the budgetary side but rich in learning opportunities. The front end of the radar set is almost entirely contained in a LimeSDR Mini, a software-defined radio that can both transmit and receive. The only additional components are a pair of soup can …read more

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Submarine to Plane: Can You Hear Me Now? The Hydrophone Radar Connection

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How does a submarine talk to an airplane? It sounds like a bad joke but it’s actually a difficult engineering challenge.

Traditionally the submarine must surface or get shallow enough to deploy a communication buoy. That communication buoy uses the same type of radio technology as planes. But submarines often rely on acoustic transmissions via hydrophones which is fancy-talk for putting speakers and microphones in the water as transmitters and receivers. This is because water is no friend to radio signals, especially high frequencies. MIT is developing a system which bridges this watery gap and it relies on acoustic transmissions …read more

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A Radar Module Teardown And Measuring Fan Speed The Hard Way

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If you have even the slightest interest in microwave electronics and radar, you’re in for a treat. The Signal Path is back with another video, and this one covers the internals of a simple 24-GHz radar module along with some experiments that we found fascinating.

The radar module that [Shahriar] works with in the video below is a CDM324 that can be picked up for a couple of bucks from the usual sources. As such it contains a lot of lessons in value engineering and designing to a price point, and the teardown reveals that it contains but a single …read more

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Researchers aim to befuddle cybercriminals with defensive WWII fighter pilot trick

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Most ethical hackers prefer to lend their services to eliminate potentially harmful bugs. But one team of white hats wants to test the opposite approach to thwarting bad actors – by wasting their time and resources with non-exploitable, intention… Continue reading Researchers aim to befuddle cybercriminals with defensive WWII fighter pilot trick→

Radar in Space: The Gemini Rendezvous Radar

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In families with three kids, the middle child always seems to get the short end of the stick. The first child gets all the attention for reaching every milestone first, and the third child will forever be the baby of the family, and the middle child gets lost in-between. Something similar happened with the U.S. manned space program in the 60s. The Mercury program got massive attention when America finally got their efforts safely off the ground, and Apollo naturally seized all the attention by making good on President Kennedy’s promise to land a man on the moon.

In between …read more

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