Fun with RADAR

Say 'radar' and most people think of cops and a speed trap, FAA air traffic controllers following airplanes, or NASA engineers tracking rockets. But RA dio D etection A nd R anging can be used for a lot of purposes including some that are simply fun. Especially when you can put a whole radar system on a 5mm x 5mm chip, like ViaSat managed to do. If you stand in a canyon and yell, you'll hear an echo when the sound of your voice bounces off the side of the canyon and back to you. Like timing a thunderclap to judge the distance to a bolt of lightning, if you time the echo of your yell and know the speed of sound (roughly 1000 feet per second) you can estimate how far away the cliffs are and how close a thunderstorm is. Flash, one-thousand, two-thousand, three..,boom! Storm is about a half-mile away. With radar, you essentially do the same thing except you use a radio signal instead of sound, and the signal propagates at almost the speed of light (about 11 inches per nan