Radar Resources

Pictures, equations and engineering jargon all combine to make this set of tutorials a great place for engineering students to get their radar on. If you aren't an engineering student, this might not be the site for you, but hey, the pictures are nice.

Didn't get enough from our history section? Check out this guide, which goes into both the basics and the history of radars. It's also going to give you tons of history on World War II. Win-win.

Humans love radar and its close cousin, sonar, but they aren't the only ones. Check out this tutorial that explains how bats use waves their own way to understand their environment without seeing anything.

Based on a true story from World War II, this British film shows a group of soldiers that protect their radio-finding technology from the enemy. Come for the compelling story, stay for the faithful depiction of the technology.

An oldie, but a goodie. This movie about storm chasers shows the use of radars in weather—especially tracking the movement of tornadoes. We can't vouch for the quality of the movie itself, but the use of weather radars is good.

When a radar scientist is captured by the enemy in World War II, a radar defense bureau operative saves the scientist—and the system of defense radars he's sworn to protect. Not so great on the radar-side of things, but what can you do? It's a thriller from the 40s.

The plight of the kangaroo is indeed difficult, but this may help with autonomous driving someday. For Australians.

Schools like MIT, Michigan State, and Colorado State want to see radar goggles happen. Google's aiming a little deeper: it wants to make it easier for a radar to see people. Hopefully it works out better than Google Glass.

Back in the day, radars had to go into a Boeing cargo plane just to move around. Now we can fit them in our pockets. Nice work, engineers.

Power and pulses go together like peanut butter and bacon: you'd never think of the combination on your own, but the minute you try it? Mind. Blown.

Sometimes you've just got to raise your head and shout towards the sky. (No? Just us?) That's exactly what these radars are doing, except instead of "disturbing the peace," and "waking up the neighbors," these radars are trying to detect airplanes, satellite, weather, or other anomalies in the sky.

Doppler radars detect changes in the phase of the scattering information. This time, a Doppler radar is being used to figure out the velocity changes in the lower atmosphere, which it's doing by detecting changes in liquid concentrations of the environment.

Easily confusable with a hair-dryer, radar guns use the changing slant ranges of a vehicle to figure out how fast you're going. When you use one to track speeds, though, you need to move the gun to follow the vehicle if you want to get a speed estimate.