This forum is too quiet. I conclude that most of the members communicate with each other by other media! My pastime for the past few weeks has been to try to infect the world with the following idea for a project, but I'm not going to move to NYC to promote it.
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Passive Radar Detection At Home
The objective of “Passive Radar Detection At Home” is to make a constantly updated radar map of air traffic available on the web. This map would not be a “real time” map. It would have a time lag similar to the lag in weather radar maps on the web.
What is the use of doing this? I just think it would be a neat thing to watch. Perhaps archives of the map could be used to investigate aircraft disappearances or accidents. On the other hand, I suppose many government agencies would argue that such a map would be a bad thing and try to censor it.
The method for producing the map is suggested by the “SETI At Home” project and also by a paper on “Passive Radar Detection” on the website of the National UFO Reporting Center. People that believe we are visited by extraterrestrials would probably be interested in using the map to investigate UFO incidents. However, that isn’t my own motivation.
“Passive Radar Detection” is a well known idea. In such a system, you don’t build any equipment to emit radar signals. Instead you use “public” sources of signals like commercial radio stations or radar transmitters belonging to other people. You put some antennas near the sources to get a reference signals. Ideally, you put other antennas in places where they only get theses signals if they are reflected from aircraft. Or you may have receivers that filter out the direct signals. By doing computations that compare the reference and reflected signals, you can find aircraft locations.
“SETI At Home” is socio-technical project. Signal data (received from space) is collected at a central location. The data is sent out over the web to people who volunteer the use of their computers. It is processed and the results are sent back to a centralized location.
The idea that I call “Passive Radar Detection At Home” is a reverse-analogy to “SETI At Home”. Recruit volunteers all over the world to attach radar receivers to their PCs. They will collect the signal data and send it back to a central location for analysis. At the central location, aircraft locations are plotted and the map is drawn. The results are published on the web.
Hopefully, a volunteer's radar receiver could be a simple device, not a big scanning dish. The PC would run software to transmit data about received signals over the web to the the site that analyzes data. It would also do other simple functions. For example, if the job of the volunteer site is to receive reflected signals, the software could decided when it was worthwhile to send information over the web vs when the site is only seeing empty sky.
Data would include a time stamp since the site that analyzes the data can’t rely on getting the information instantaneously. This means that each volunteer site would need to have an accurate clock.
Since this is a socio-technological idea, some the “socio” aspects are interesting to discuss. However, at the moment, I’m mainly interested in whether the “techno” side is feasible.
I suspect that radar specialists will take a dim view of it. The business of having dispersed recievers that may turn off or on, each one possibly having different specs - it just sounds like bad design. However it might interest mathematicians and computer scientists who like the challenges of noisy data.