The Hughes AN/ASG-18 Fire Control System was a prototype airborne radar/combination system for the planned North American XF-108 Rapier interceptor aircraft for the United States Air Force, and later for the Lockheed YF-12. Early pulse-dopplers were incompatible with other high power microwave amplification devices that are not coherent, but more sophisticated techniques were developed that record the phase of each transmitted pulse for comparison to returned echoes.Įarly examples of military systems includes the AN/SPG-51B developed during the 1950s specifically for the purpose of operating in hurricane conditions with no performance degradation. This required the development of the klystron, the traveling wave tube, and solid state devices. Pulse-Doppler radar was developed during World War II to overcome limitations by increasing pulse repetition frequency. This phenomenon was adapted for use with weather radar in the 1950s after declassification of some World War II systems. Doppler has maximum detrimental effect on moving target indicator systems, which must use reverse phase shift for Doppler compensation in the detector.ĭoppler weather effects (precipitation) were also found to degrade conventional radar and moving target indicator radar, which can mask aircraft reflections. Fast-moving objects cause a phase-shift on the transmit pulse that can produce signal cancellation. The reason was traced to Doppler effects that degrade performance of systems not designed to account for moving objects. The earliest radar systems failed to operate as expected.

Besides the above conventional surveillance applications, pulse-Doppler radar has been successfully applied in healthcare, such as fall risk assessment and fall detection, for nursing or clinical purposes. In air traffic control, they are used for discriminating aircraft from clutter. Pulse-Doppler radar is also the basis of synthetic aperture radar used in radar astronomy, remote sensing and mapping. Pulse-Doppler techniques also find widespread use in meteorological radars, allowing the radar to determine wind speed from the velocity of any precipitation in the air. A secondary advantage in military radar is to reduce the transmitted power while achieving acceptable performance for improved safety of stealthy radar. This gives pulse-Doppler radars ' look-down/shoot-down' capability. As the ground moves at the same speed but opposite direction of the aircraft, Doppler techniques allow the ground return to be filtered out, revealing aircraft and vehicles. However, this only worked when the radar antenna was not pointed down in that case the reflection off the ground overwhelmed any returns from other objects. Earlier radars had used pulse-timing in order to determine range and the angle of the antenna (or similar means) to determine the bearing. Pulse-Doppler systems were first widely used on fighter aircraft starting in the 1960s. The first operational Pulse Doppler radar was in the CIM-10 Bomarc, an American long range supersonic missile powered by ramjet engines, and which was armed with a W40 nuclear weapon to destroy entire formations of attacking enemy aircraft. It combines the features of pulse radars and continuous-wave radars, which were formerly separate due to the complexity of the electronics.

See for a more extensive discussion.A pulse-Doppler radar is a radar system that determines the range to a target using pulse-timing techniques, and uses the Doppler effect of the returned signal to determine the target object's velocity. Weather radars can also pick up returns from nearby objects on the ground (ground clutter) and flying insects. So, rain will occur in some places (such as the western side of the Olympic Mountains) without it showing up on our loop. The beam can be blocked by mountains, and some areas are simply too far away from any radar. The coverage of the Pacific Northwest by weather radar is by no means uniform. Our loop shows the signals recorded by several radars in the northwest over the last several hours. High values of dbz (color scale to the right of the image) indicate large drops and heavy precipitation. Raindrops and snow produce reflections that become stronger as the size of the drop or flake increases. Weather radars send out pulses of microwave energy and listen between the transmitted pulses for part of that the energy to be reflected back to the radar.