Britain Could Switch Off Airport Radar and Release 5G Spectrum 175
judgecorp writes "Britain is considering switching off air traffic control radar systems and using "passive radar" instead. A two year feasibility study will consider using a network of ground stations which monitor broadcast TV signals and measure echoes from aircraft to determine their location and velocity. The system is not a new idea — early radar experiments used BBC shortwave transmitters as a signal source before antenna technology produced a transceiver suitable for radar — but could now be better than conventional radar thanks to new antenna designs and signal processing techniques. It will also save money and energy by eliminating transmitters — and release spectrum for 5G services."
Good idea (Score:5, Informative)
It works for detecting stealth fighters over Iran, it should certainly work for non-stealth commercial aircraft.
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The stealth fighter is ancient technology. The faceted sides are because no on had the processing power to calculate radar signatures for rounded surfaces. The stealth generations as I recall:
1st: cruise missiles
2nd: B-1 Lancer
3rd: F-117
4th: B-2 stealth bomber
5th: F-22 Raptor
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The real reason they're doing this is to test the new Ubuntu £inux phones. Those phones have experimental GPS tracking ribbons that transmit your location to the NSA from anywhere in the world along with a list of all the files on your phone. These are the same tracking ribbons used in 20 dollar bills. They have internal power supplies that are as thin as, well, paper, and are based on dark projects. Ubuntu phone is the next step.
Wow they have a great plan .... just wait for the 100% take up of Ubuntu phone and ... oh wait!
Re:Good idea (Score:5, Funny)
The stealth fighter is not really stealthy, we know about it otherwise if it was truely stealth we wouldnt even know it exists.
Then again it can be picked up by weather radar also. Its a huge failure.
Perhaps the current stealth fighters are just cover technology for the real ... wait a minute someone's knocking at the door
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That depends on the goal of the stealth tech. On the one hand, a fighter that you can't detect at all is helpful, but there are other goals for stealth tech. For example, it's awfully helpful to have an aircraft that can't be tracked by targeting radar. Not having to worry about RADAR-based SAMs or AAMs is really nice.
Weather RADAR tracking of stealth fighters is great for knowing that one is inside your borders, but not so good for providing targeting to anti-air systems.
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The Stealth Fighter (F117) is getting to be fairly old technology these days - after all it has been in operational use for over 23 years.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong? (Score:2)
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People could feel that 4g is fast enough and have absolutely zero interest in upgrading, thus robbing the UK government of over inflated profits at auction, then again, it has a higher number, consumers will happily buy in.
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Not quite sure what your point is. Mine is that airport radar is critical safety equipment that I don't want compromised so some teen can stream One Direction in HD.
Typical oldster, hey! leave us kids alone! no sense of fun yourselves, so you just don't want us to enjoy ourselves, it's not even fair, I'm going to marry Harry when I grow up, no one understands me...
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I have read articles that claim you could run a swarm of LEO satellites at 500 - 800 km high that talk to each other with lasers, and the ground with microwaves.
Basically a mesh network in space. In remote areas you would beat wired speeds.
Of course you need a lot of satellites for coverage, and a microwave transceiver for each connection to the swarm-net.
Everything needs to know where everything else is (to point the lasers
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First thing that could go wrong is a power cut. A traditional radar system can easily be run on a backup generator.
A power outage in Guildford shouldn't cause flight delays (or worse) at Heathrow.
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Well, firstly, since there are lots of transmitters, the loss of one in Guildford isn't going to shut the entire passive radar system down.
Secondly, no one is talking about removing SSR (secondary surveillance radar) which is based off actively interrogating transponders fitted to the aircraft. Indeed, the CAA is forcing everyone to move to (very expensive) Mode-S SSR transponders, a technology that's really already obsolete.
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BA 5390 didn't need radar to guide it down. No maps got sucked out.
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"but due to the congested airspace around both Gatwick and Heathrow, he was directed to land at Southampton Airport. Southampton was closer, but all the maps and charts had been lost in the blow-out, and having never landed there before, the co-pilot was obviously anxious about the prospect of making a good landing."
http://www.fss.aero/accident-reports/dvdfiles/GB/1990-06-10-UK.pdf [fss.aero]
"The co-pilot had requested radar vectors to the nearest airport and had bee
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They can have weather radar along with a radar altimeter, but I think you're right that they don't have radar for detecting nearby aircraft.
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Civillian aircraft have all sorts of radar: airliners can detect other aircraft. I believe there was an incident where an airliner's collision detection radar atually detected an F117 and had to temporarily abort a climb, due to a near miss.
But yes, most civillian aircraft are small don't have any radar whatsoever.
Re:What Could Possibly Go Wrong? (Score:4, Informative)
Airliners can detect other aircraft. I believe there was an incident where an airliner's collision detection radar atually detected an F117 and had to temporarily abort a climb, due to a near miss.
The Traffic Collision Avoidance System uses transponders of a particular type: they communicate with one another to determine mutual range (from round-trip signal times), azimuth (by using directional antennas) and altitude (as reported by the transponders). TCAS is mandatory for all but small airliners in most of the world, and the military use it when they are not in combat.
http://www.ll.mit.edu/publications/journal/pdf/vol02_no3/2.3.7.TCAS.pdf [mit.edu]
Great Idea! (Score:2)
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Because the transponders on the planes on 9/11 in the US didn't get turned off. Who needs to track airplanes that don't identify themselves anyways? They might be able to track those drones flying over your country spying on the people.
the radar equivalent surface of a drone is a very small fraction of the radar cross section of a general aviation aircraft. moreover, most if not all the radar available are 2D, which means they do not provide the altitude of the target. that's one of the original reason for the use of transponders in general aviation: even if a Radar got an echo off an aircraft, it did not provide the altitude data, and so it would not serve to enforce vertical separation.
The main weakness of a "passive only" approac
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Already at 5G? (Score:2)
What is 5G? We've barely started rolling out 4G!
Re:Already at 5G? (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously... You've not heard of 5G? It's a whole G better than that dowdy old 4G. Better start saving up for it today!
I'm waiting for 8G (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't upgrade every year. I'm just waiting for 8G so the speeds will actually be as claimed for 4G
Obligatory Dilbert [dilbert.com]
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But how many G will the passengers in the plane feel when they whack into the ground at 300 mph
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By the time we get 5G here (Score:2)
By the time we get 5G here.....
You will be using an IPHONE 10.
Blackberries will be just fruit, until sued by Apple for trademark infringement.
The whole world will be run on/by Androids.
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Fie on thy archaic five gee, we have forsooth already commenced work on six AND seven gee devices!
I think we're going to have to work on the name though; 7G sounds too boring. I propose "G-Whizz" to indicate its immense speed...
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Well, yocto is an official SI prefix, meaning 10^(-24). So you need 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 yoctobytes to store just one byte.
Now to store the complete internet in several yoctobytes, you must have an extremely good compression algorithm. :-)
Re:Already at 5G? (Score:4, Informative)
Not even remotely accurate. 1G to 2G was a transition from analogue to digital cellular. You still only had a basic WAP modem function at best, and were charged per minute. At this point I had 56kbps dial up at home.
It wasn't until GPRS was added to that we even had a dedicated data channel and that was limited to sub-dial-up speeds, on a good day, but at least you were charged for the data you used and not how long your phone was online, so you could have an always-active data connection. At this point I had 512kbps broadband.
3G took that up to about 300kbps at launch - at least a tenfold improvement - and went as high as 2Mbps, before the arrival of HSDPA and related technologies that can get you up to about 50Mbps on the same spectrum. My phone was now as fast as - and often faster than - my home broadband.
1G - 0
2G - 0.05 - 0.1
3G - 0.5 - 50
4G - 50 - ?
Doesn't look like decreasing returns to me.
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Your math doesn't work out:
(2-1)/1 = 100%
(3-2)/2 = 50%
(4-3)/3 = 33%
(5-4)/4 = 25%
What they need to do is start over with an "H" instead of a "G". Sure, they'll initially take a speed hit as they go from 5 back to 1 - but then the increases will get back to a really big level:
(H1-G5)/G5 = -80%
(H2-H1)/H1 = 100%
Just come out with H1 and H2 at the same time. See, hire me!
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I am an imbecile.
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I apologize for my completely useless posts, devoid of all content. :)
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I invite you to go learn how 4G works, and come back and tell us the results.
By no fault on your part, you will probably not understand what the hell is going on.
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It's easy, each G is faster than the prior G. The only question is, are H's even faster than G's? Do you work for the phone company? Can I have a job there?
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It's not so easy. [wikipedia.org]
If you want something specific to puzzle over, try reading about QAM [wikipedia.org].
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All joking aside, if T-Mobile can go from 3 to 4 without really changing anything, then my theory isn't very funny. If it was ever funny.
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What is 5G? We've barely started rolling out 4G!
Let this short instructional film explain (it really explains nothing btw). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txjqV6eKabs [youtube.com]
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49 m/s^2 (Score:2)
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Truly, we live in an age of wonders.
Infomercial Airlines (Score:2)
So the safety of air traffic will rely on infomercials being on all night? Sounds like something the FCC will jump in on too!
The following is a paid advertisement, the views expressed are not the views of the network, we are however required by law to broadcast them to ensure the safety of air traffic throughout the evening. Please stay tuned for this important safety related broadcast.
Re:Infomercial Airlines (Score:4, Informative)
To everyone thinking that safety will depend on the TV transmitters being always on, this is likely to replace only *one* of the types of radar, primary radar (where you send out a signal and look for reflections). SSR (secondary surveillance radar) won't be going away. This type of radar sends out a signal and the aircraft actively replies.
Primary radar is used to paint targets that don't have transponders. What the CAA has been angling to do for a while now is make Mode-S transponders mandatory in controlled airspace (they did want everything, including hang gliders(!) to carry a Mode-S transponder at one point). Therefore the cost will just be transferred to the hand-to-mouth sector of aviation if they want to still have access to controlled airspace.
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This addresses part of my question below. Thank you.
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I understand hangglider users are rather annoyed at this: Those transponders are designed for extreme reliability and durability, and as such they are of considerable weight. Enough to seriously impair performance on such a small and lightweight glider.
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I understand hangglider users are rather annoyed at this: Those transponders are designed for extreme reliability and durability, and as such they are of considerable weight. Enough to seriously impair performance on such a small and lightweight glider.
Corner reflectors and tinfoil hats come to the rescue.
Ten years away (Score:3)
Radar provider Thales has been given government funding by the Technology Strategy Board to investigate how existing TV signals could be used to locate and track aircraft
Thales are just starting out on this. An industrialised solution is therefore a decade away from availability and another ten years from being accepted as a primary source of data on aircraft movements.
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Radar is already secondary. Most information these days comes from GPS transponders on the aircraft, not radar. It's plotted on a radar screen but that's not where the info came from.
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Primary surveillance works by reflection. Secondary surveillance works with transponders. Here in Australia secondary surveillance radars are being shut down to be replaced with ADS-B but primary radars are being upgraded.
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That sounds about right for something that's meant to complement 5G cellular adoption, then.
A lot of signals .... (Score:5, Interesting)
What do you see if you take a closer look into the VHF signals arround there?
That's a 50Mhz TV transmiter carrier.
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8383/8473254438_2a2f9819d2_o.jpg
A lot of aircraft reflections everywhere. ;)
Sould be "easy" to implement a multistatic radar with gnuradio.
73 de EA1FAQ
Re:A lot of signals .... (Score:5, Interesting)
Wish you'd posted that logged in so you could get the karma.
Aircraft scatter on the microwave bands is good fun, with paths from Scotland into Norway and even as far south as Denmark. For those who haven't come across it, this is pretty much what the name suggests - point your aerial up and out over the sea when there are aircraft in roughly the right place, and listen for other stations doing the same and being reflected back off the aircraft fuselage. Because the signal is so tiny (a plane isn't that big, really) you need to use Morse code or one of the small-signal digital modes.
FB QSO YR 599 OM
73s de MM0YEQ
Government control of private transmitters? (Score:2)
Are all TV transmitters in England government-run? The problem I see arising from this plan is privately-operated TV stations become a critical infrastructure and eventually fall under government control for integrity and safety purposes. If a TV transmitter shuts down for whatever reason, planned or other-wise, then that part of the air traffic system could fail or operate under reduced capacity. If required for air traffic control, would TV stations then become "too important to fail?"
*sigh* Guess I h
Re:Government control of private transmitters? (Score:5, Informative)
All of the BBC's transmitters were sold off to a private company years ago as part of the Broadcasting Act 1990.
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Airport radar systems can fail, too.
Maybe you'd better call them and express your concerns...
It's worth it. (Score:2)
People need to share HD videos of their shitty cats with their Facebook friends.
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Oh come on, it's not just cat videos, people need to be able to share smug self-superior posts on slashdot, too.
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Offended much?
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No. You have to try harder than that.
Re:It's worth it. (Score:5, Funny)
Cat5 cable is purpose built for the task.
If that's not enough the natural solution is to log onto the net with cat5e for 2.7 times more bandwidth.
Could this be "hacked"? (Score:2)
What I mean is could someone set up a directional transmitter in just the right way so that reflections coming off the place make it look like its a few hundred metres to the north or south and thereby cause a collision?
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Indeed, what he's describing is a pretty standard radar countermeasure. That the source is the radio broadcast background and not a special transmitter really doesn't make a difference. If anything, passive radar has the advantage that you could run a band pass filter to remove and ignore the jamming signal.
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Except with normal radar you know roughly when and what to expect at the receiver. Using background RF you don't.
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The same disadvantage affects the person trying to spoof the signal. He has to know what his radar reflection looks like before he can spoof it, and as an added complication he has to perform a transform on it so it looks convincing when it's coming from a different location.
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The person doing the spoofing doesn't know what signal to expect in either case. However, in one case the radar operator knows exactly what signal to expect. That is definitely an element of asymmetry that favors the active radar operator.
Imagine a radar pulse that consisted of nothing more than a crytographically signed digest of the time. Nobody can generate that signal but the operator, though you could try to replay it (which means the operator gets two returns, and the first one is the non-spoofed o
Yay! (Score:2)
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How is this "crowd sourcing"? They aren't asking the public to decode the radar, they are recognizing the waste in bandwidth to pour a constant signal into the sky when there are already dozens or even hundreds of transmitters doing this.
What will thry do for radar... (Score:2)
...when power failures or other disasters take the TV stations off the air?
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Switch to active-mode, seeing as there's nothing to cause interference with?
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They will continue using SSR (no one is talking about getting rid of secondary surveillance radar, which is where you send a signal and a device on the aircraft actively replies with a packet of data), and continue using the signals from the transmitters that are outside of the power failure/disaster area. In fact this will likely be more resilient, because of instead of a very small number of special purpose transmitters providing the primary radar transmission (which are likely to be taken out by the same
Sounds more like a problem... (Score:2)
5G needed? Not in Canada at least. (Score:2)
Not to be a Luddite here, but is 5G really needed?
I mean at least in Canada, 5G is like giving the Amish a Porche 911, we just can't use it.
I live in a country where "unlimited data" means roughly about 2GB a month, then the carriers start throttling and doing unsavory things to make sure my wireless data experience craps out long before I hit any real limits. So all 5G is going to do for me is ensure I have crappy wireless service about 4 days after my billing cycle begins anew.
Also 4G is faster then most
dangerously stupid (Score:2)
Here in the US, there's been a lot in *increase* in radar use at airports... becuase they're now using it to view microclimes, as well... and planes have gone off the runways, and there have been other near accidents, that we now know had to do with sudden strong winds and bursts.
mark
Re:UK and TV rader? LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah given the fact the UK has had only 4 TV channels for decades, took another decade to add a 5th channel, and reception is piss poor unless you live under an antenna.
And UK is one of the bussiest airspaces in the world.
I do not like this one bit.
um.. we have about 50 channels or so on broadcast TV now and countless bullshit channels factoring in satellite and cable
i get a better reception on the digital channels than i did on the analogue set up... not that i watch it much tbh... it's 99% shit which is generally what happens with hundreds of channels... that and fucking repeats
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um.. we have about 50 channels or so on broadcast TV now and countless bullshit channels
And program quality has dropped down to Anerican levels, yes. The relationbetween program quality and number of channels has again been proven to be inversely proportional.
Worse, the BBC is now in a deep financial crisis from having to fill up multiple channels instead of just two, quality ones.
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um.. we have about 50 channels or so on broadcast TV now and countless bullshit channels
And program quality has dropped down to Anerican levels, yes. The relationbetween program quality and number of channels has again been proven to be inversely proportional.
Worse, the BBC is now in a deep financial crisis from having to fill up multiple channels instead of just two, quality ones.
Not really. TV wise, the BBC funds BBC1, BBC2, and News Channel. BBC3, BBC4, CBBC, Cbeebies are part time channels occupying 2 full time slots.
Radio wise, digitial has added Radio 6, 1Extra, 4Extra and Asian Network. All of which are fairly cheap (I think the budget for the 1 extra is less than the budget for radio1's breakfast show)
There's also BBC World, which is supposed to be fully funded, however shares a lot of infrastructure with News Channel and national news. On the flip side, the advertising bring
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BBC3, BBC4, CBBC, Cbeebies are part time channels occupying 2 full time slots
True - though I do wonder how much the wasted bandwidth costs just broadcasting the ident for half the day on all four of these, when they could free up 2 channels by switching from CBeebies to BBC3 (and CBBC to BBC4) at 7pm when the kids channels stop broadcasting...
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US seems to be polarized between the extremely crap and extremely good. Fortunately these days it is much easier to just watch the good stuff.
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Not true!!! Every other show is Top Gear (with the odd Man vs Food once in a while)
Should we just rename all the channels Dave - to avoid confusion...?
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I'm not entirely sure what your point is supposed to be. Are you under the impression that there is insufficient TV broadcast intensity for passive radar to work?
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All those channels, as i said are shit, not that the originals were generally much better to be frank and under 10 of them on terrestrial are +1 channels
i only mentioned satellite in respect of channel numbers and not in reference to this technique for radar
Also the digital switchover finished last year i believe
as for quality.. it's all just
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The last two governments over there beat you to it. Pointing out that Blair was an idiot for his "Saddam can attack London in X minutes" and more recently having a Tory's name on a list of suspected pedophiles rebounded with more interference than the BBC has seen before.
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No, it's still a lot better. We still have our great original content on the terrestrial channels and the good imported shows are available with only three times three-minute ad breaks.
Frankly I'm watching more stuff on-demand or with DVD rentals than live, though. TV is dead.
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I'm someone else who hardly watches TV now, if it wasn't for kids' TV and my wife enjoying soap operas I don't think we'd bother having a TV except to watch films on.
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iplayer for BBC content is about all. They have the news on in the lunch room so I've some idea of the 24hour repeat news world.
TV content people - I'm out.
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It's analogous to navigating a dark room by looking at the light coming from the TV set. Although the light from the TV is a signal carrier and is constantly changing, it is consistent enough in time and space that you can use the light reflected off nearby objects to navigate.