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“This film examines the history and development of radar, its use in the Battle of Britain, and types of radar readout equipment.”
US Army Training Film TF11-3156
Reupload of a previously uploaded film with improved video & sound.
Public domain film from the US National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
Radar is an object-detection system which uses radio waves to determine the range, altitude, direction, or speed of objects. It can be used to detect aircraft, ships, spacecraft, guided missiles, motor vehicles, weather formations, and terrain. The radar dish or antenna transmits pulses of radio waves or microwaves which bounce off any object in their path. The object returns a tiny part of the wave’s energy to a dish or antenna which is usually located at the same site as the transmitter.
Radar was secretly developed by several nations before and during World War II. The term RADAR was coined in 1941 by the United States Navy as an acronym for RAdio Detection And Ranging. The term radar has since entered English and other languages as the common noun radar, losing all capitalization.
The modern uses of radar are highly diverse, including air traffic control, radar astronomy, air-defense systems, antimissile systems; marine radars to locate landmarks and other ships; aircraft anticollision systems; ocean surveillance systems, outer space surveillance and rendezvous systems; meteorological precipitation monitoring; altimetry and flight control systems; guided missile target locating systems; and ground-penetrating radar for geological observations. High tech radar systems are associated with digital signal processing and are capable of extracting useful information from very high noise levels.
Other systems similar to radar make use of other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. One example is “lidar”, which uses visible light from lasers rather than radio waves…
History
As early as 1886, Heinrich Hertz showed that radio waves could be reflected from solid objects…
In 1922 A. Hoyt Taylor and Leo C. Young, researchers working with the U.S. Navy, discovered that when radio waves were broadcast at 60 MHz it was possible to determine the range and bearing of nearby ships in the Potomac River..
Before the Second World War, researchers in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States, independently and in great secrecy, developed technologies that led to the modern version of radar. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa followed prewar Great Britain, and Hungary had similar developments during the war…
Full radar evolved as a pulsed system, and the first such elementary apparatus was demonstrated in December 1934 by the American Robert M. Page, working at the Naval Research Laboratory. The following year, the United States Army successfully tested a primitive surface-to-surface radar to aim coastal battery search lights at night. This was followed by a pulsed system demonstrated in May 1935 by Rudolf Kühnhold and the firm GEMA in Germany and then one in June 1935 by an Air Ministry team led by Robert A. Watson Watt in Great Britain. Later, in 1943, Page greatly improved radar with the monopulse technique that was used for many years in most radar applications.
The British were the first to fully exploit radar as a defence against aircraft attack…
A radar system has a transmitter that emits radio waves called radar signals in predetermined directions. When these come into contact with an object they are usually reflected or scattered in many directions. Radar signals are reflected especially well by materials of considerable electrical conductivity—especially by most metals, by seawater, by wet land, and by wetlands. Some of these make the use of radar altimeters possible. The radar signals that are reflected back towards the transmitter are the desirable ones that make radar work. If the object is moving either toward or away from the transmitter, there is a slight equivalent change in the frequency of the radio waves, caused by the Doppler effect…
