Hello. Is it possible to create an Arduino radar powerful enough to detect and track and a plane or model rocket. Basically, I want to create a radar with Arduino that has a range of miles and not meters. Is this possible and what sensor would I use? Thanks.
You would NOT get a licence to track anything with RADAR over 100 meters or so.
What's the budget? Do you own a magnetron, klystron or TWT?
Neat thing is a magnetron magnet brings a power meter to a complete stop.
The budget is like 500 dollars for a engineering project for school.
Your testing for the licence to operate the RADAR will cost you more than this.
People have done passive bistatic radars capable of tracking aircraft using very low-cost RTL-SDR receivers, but these are PC-based rather than Arduino.
The general principle behind a passive bistatic radar is that an emitter of opportunity (e.g. broadcast FM or TV) is received on one channel with a directional antenna and the reflection of that signal off the target is received on a second frequency coherent receiver and directional antenna. The time and Doppler shift of the reflected signal are determined using cross correlation techniques to give the differential range and velocity of the target.
Needless to say, achieving success at this sort of thing requires a significant level of understanding radio electronics and digital signal processing.
https://www.rtl-sdr.com/passive-radar-dual-coherent-channel-rtl-sdr/
How would you aim the radar at the rocket?
Idk. I guess a servo aimed at it when it launches. I'll look into the above comments thanks everybody.
I am going to bet that a magnetron is going to cost quite a large bit of that 500.00. Anyways, you can get a CW or Pulse magnetron of 30 to 100Kw from these guys that sell them, it might be more cost effective to pick up a search radar from a yacht or large boat. A good narrow beam pulsed magnetron, c-band, should be able to get you model rocket type telemetry with little to no issue.
engineer123498:
Idk. I guess a servo aimed at it when it launches. I'll look into the above comments thanks everybody.
Aiming isn't that hard provided you know where to aim at in the first place... but considering you're trying to track it, you don't yet know where the rocket is, so you don't know where to aim!
Radars typically scan the surroundings, then tell you where objects are. The shift between scans is the tracking part. In most jurisdictions you indeed will need some kind of radar operating license when using those things.
The issue of power is going to be independent of the Arduino. The Arduino would simply act as a trigger and UI funnel. The radar voodoo (RF generation, amplification, transmission, reception, mixing, timing and computation) would occur on a commercial radar front end.
Is radar feasible over a range of miles for a target as small as a model rocket? I doubt it. An aircraft? Perhaps, but the power required would put you into serious legal jeopardy. The FCC is deadly serious about spectrum usage and for good reason. Besides, I think you'd need to add a good number of zeros to your budget to get it off the ground.
Perhaps you can come up with a means of having, say, a GPS in the rocket or airplane that transmits its fix to an GPS-equipped Arduino base station and you can do some math to determine heading/distance/altitude etc of the target from the base station.
Go to the seaside and hit boatyards. They toss old radars out all the time. You can get the guts out of one and maybe cobble something together from there?
-jim lee
First : Does it have to work?
Many school projects only need to show research and attempts.
Not a working model
Second: have you read what an XY problem is?
Is the goal tracking or using radar?
Blackfin:
Is radar feasible over a range of miles for a target as small as a model rocket? I doubt it. An aircraft? Perhaps, but the power required would put you into serious legal jeopardy.
In the late 70's one experiment with the AGIS radar system [AEGIS? Moderator edit] was to detect how small of an object the system could detect. At 110 miles from the radar a pea sized object not only was detected but the direction the pea sized object was moving in was recorded.
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Idahowalker:
In the late 70's one experiment with the AGIS radar system [AEGIS? Moderator edit] was to detect how small of an object the system could detect. At 110 miles from the radar a pea sized object not only was detected but the direction the pea sized object was moving in was recorded.
Cool. I guess anything is possible with billions of development dollars available.
Ok, so basically recreate this with RADAR modules instead of ultrasonic modules?
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