Download or read book Radar Cross Section Measurements written by Eugene F. Knott and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 557 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The original campus of the University of Michigan was nearly a perfect square about a half-mile along a side. A street-sized walk, appropriately called the Diag, runs diagonally across this square, connecting its southeast and northwest corners. In 1904 a new engineering building was either started or finished (I do not remember which) to house classrooms. When another engineering building was built on the expanded campus across the street from it many years later, the old building came to be known as West Engine, to distinguish it from the new East Engine. Old West Engine is (or maybe by now, was) a four-story, L-shaped structure that stood at the southeast corner of the original campus. It was built with an arch in it to straddle the Diag at the apex of the L. You walked over the Engineering Arch to get from one leg of the L to the other if you were inside the building, and you walked under it when you entered the campus from the southeast corner. Affixed to the masonry wall of the arch was a plaque I often noted in passing. It bore a quote attributed to Horace Greeley (1811-1872), who I did not know at the time was the founder, editor, and publisher of the New York Tribune. It said, simply, Young man, when theory and practice differ, use your horse sense. The suggestion seems worthy of an exclamation point instead of a period, but I do not remember if it had one.
Download or read book Characterization of the Target Mount Interaction in Radar Cross Section Measurement Calibrations written by Donald W. Powers and published by . This book was released on 2004-03-01 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Radar Cross Section (RCS) measurements are quintessential in understanding target scattering phenomenon. The reduced RCS of modern weapons systems stresses the capability of current RCS measurement ranges. A limiting factor that has recently become more significant is the electromagnetic coupling between a test target and the mounting hardware used to support it and control its orientation during the RCS measurement. Equally important is the electromagnetic coupling between the RCS calibration artifact and its mount, which provides an opportunity to explore the coupling phenomena without delving into operationally sensitive areas. The primary research goal was to characterize the interaction between a calibration artifact and its mounting apparatus when measuring the RCS of the calibration artifact as part of a larger RCS measurement process. Standard methods, such as vector background subtraction, do not account for this interaction. By understanding the interaction term, a more accurate measurement of target RCS may be obtained. Through careful characterization of the interaction, an additional term can be included in the vector background subtraction equation to reduce the level of uncertainty. Two techniques were developed to isolate and characterize the interaction between the target and mount. The first involves evaluating the far- zone fields scattered by the target under two conditions: the target alone and then the target with mounting hardware present. The fields are then coherently subtracted to isolate the interaction. This process was validated with measurements and computational results. The second technique involves evaluating fields on the target surface under the aforementioned conditions, which are subsequently subtracted from one another and radiated to the far-field.