Most active commenters

    ←back to thread

    137 points transpute | 11 comments | | HN request time: 1.1s | source | bottom
    Show context
    transpute ◴[] No.44417727[source]
    More coverage of RF sensing, including laptops/phones with radios+NPU to sense their human:

    2025, "Espargos: ESP32-based WiFi sensing array", 30 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43079023

    2024, "How Wi-Fi sensing became usable to track people's movements", https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/02/27/1088154/wifi-sen...

    2023, "What Is mmWave Radar?: Everything You Need to Know About FMCW", 30 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35312351

    2022, "mmWave radar, you won't see it coming", 180 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30172647

    2021, "The next big Wi-Fi standard is for sensing, not communication", 200 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29901587

    replies(3): >>44419092 #>>44419294 #>>44421801 #
    Animats ◴[] No.44419092[source]
    Right. The longer range versions of multistatic radar are used to detect stealth aircraft.[1][2] All that careful stealth geometry to minimize direct reflections doesn't help much when the emitters and receivers are in different locations.

    [1] https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2024/11/18/737423/guardians-of...

    [2] https://www.yiminzhang.com/pdf/radar13_passive.pdf

    replies(3): >>44420317 #>>44421093 #>>44424653 #
    4gotunameagain ◴[] No.44420317[source]
    No but the highly classified radar absorbing compounds that stealth aircraft are wrapped in definitely help :)
    replies(2): >>44420349 #>>44420563 #
    1. WJW ◴[] No.44420563[source]
    (context: I used to be involved in the design of military radar systems for the Dutch navy)

    The radar absorbing compounds of stealth aircraft are highly optimized for specific wavelengths (usually X-band) and fall off heavily outside that frequency band. Similarly, the radar cross section of stealthy aircraft is highly optimized for specific purposes (usually evading GBAD in the forward direction) and rapidly falls off in other scenarios. Most "stealth" aircraft are actually fairly visible from other directions.

    That said, multistatic radar with transmitters-of-opportunity like cell towers and civil radio stations has always been in strong competition with fusion power as "the tech that is forever 10 years in the future". The transmitters are often not very powerful compared to dedicated radar systems and worse, they transmit energy in the horizontal plane rather than upwards where the planes are. The frequencies involved are much lower, which inherently leads to less radial accuracy unless you use VERY large antennas. Unlike a dedicated radar system the signals they send out are typically not shaped optimally for radar purposes, so signal processing like pulse compression becomes much harder. Because the signals are inherently not as predictable as normal radar signals you need MUCH more computing power. Finally, atmospheric conditions become fiendishly tricky for long range, because signal delays between each transmitter-target-receiver triple will be different. This means resolution goes way down if there's too many clouds or ionospheric interference, often to the point of uselessness.

    Many of those problems are mostly terrible when trying to detect aircraft at long range though, and largely go away for short range surface use like in port. I'm still not entirely sure why for a port, which is stationary and requires tons of infrastructure investment anyway, this system would be preferable to a normal civilian type radar system. You can get a conventional one for at most a few tens of thousands, while this system apparently requires a trailer full of RF signal processing equipment. That is likely to cost at least in the order of magnitude more, while probably being less accurate.

    replies(3): >>44421832 #>>44422105 #>>44424657 #
    2. throw0101b ◴[] No.44421832[source]
    > (context: I used to be involved in the design of military radar systems for the Dutch navy) […] Most "stealth" aircraft are actually fairly visible from other directions.

    Is that different than ships, which in recent years/decades have tended to look a certain way (a 'finite' number of fixed angles):

    * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knud_Rasmussen-class_patrol_ve...

    * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absalon-class_frigate

    Do ships have to have a low return (?) at more angles?

    replies(2): >>44422895 #>>44425111 #
    3. sorenjan ◴[] No.44422105[source]
    I've seen SDRs being used to track civilian airplanes using TV transmitters. Using two antennas/receivers, one pointed at the transmitter as reference and one towards a big air traffic plane, they might get a couple km range. While the concept is really interesting, it doesn't seem very practical to try to see smaller fighter jets or even stealth planes beyond visual range. And TV transmitters are probably among the most powerful transmitters in common use.
    replies(1): >>44422447 #
    4. logifail ◴[] No.44422447[source]
    > I've seen SDRs being used to track civilian airplanes using TV transmitters

    I was reading about that and was really interested in trying it - got quite close to buying some kit (KrakenSDR) - then it seemed that particular capability got removed suddenly a couple of years ago due to ITAR regulations, or at least legal types getting worried about ITAR...

    https://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/comments/yu9rei/krakenrf_pul...

    replies(1): >>44424575 #
    5. WJW ◴[] No.44422895[source]
    Ships like that are typically optimized to look small from "low" angles, ie from the perspective of other surface combatants and sea skimming anti ship missiles. The large flat surfaces are not so much used to reduce RCS by themselves, but mostly to reduce instances of "corner reflectors" like hatches and exposed cranes the like, which can have a RCS many times larger than their physical size due to their shape.

    See also the "Reduction" section on Wikipedia in the article about Radar Cross Section: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_cross_section#Purpose_sh...).

    replies(1): >>44424795 #
    6. smath ◴[] No.44424575{3}[source]
    The code from kraken was removed -- I think because it was open source? I think its still ok to write your own code (Discalimer: I havent done this so please verify on your own obvisouly)
    7. smath ◴[] No.44424657[source]
    Very interesting, thanks for sharing. I'm curious about the following:

    (1) Seems like these very challenges also make the space more interesting because not everyone can make a good passive radar system and the passive aspect obviously provides stealth (not to the plane, but to the party doing the surveillance). Is this fair to say? (2) What if there are multiple receivers in clock sync? Does that make it easier? (3) I'm a bit confused about your comment about very large antennas -- I thought antenna size should be proportional to the wavelength. So if the system is using digital TV broadcast, then the antenna size would be roughly the size of DTV antennas, and bigger would not necessarily help? Or is this not the case? (4) Re the ionopheric issues -- do the clouds or ionophere reflect the TV/fm waves? I thought each tx-target-rx triplet having a different delay would be a good thing because it would dismbiguate multiple targets.

    8. throw0101b ◴[] No.44424795{3}[source]
    Would airborne radar be better able to find ships with these designs (at least relatively speaking)?
    9. saltcured ◴[] No.44425111[source]
    As I recall, the faceted look of the early stealth aircraft was said to be a practical matter. It reduced the complexity of modeling the reflections during the design process. So with additional computational complexity, they could go back to smooth surfaces in later designs.

    I imagine there are similar issues with ship design. Since these things are wavelength specific, you probably have a bigger computational problem for a bigger vessel. You can't just solve for the design on a miniature and scale it up to build it.

    replies(1): >>44447235 #
    10. Animats ◴[] No.44447235{3}[source]
    > I imagine there are similar issues with ship design.

    The U.S. Navy built some stealthy ships.[1][2] But they were very expensive. It seems to have been a dead end not worth the trouble. There are so many sensors, shipborne, airborne, spaceborne, and onshore, that trying to hide a slow moving warship isn't likely to work against a peer opponent.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Shadow_(IX-529)

    [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Zumwalt

    replies(1): >>44460801 #
    11. saltcured ◴[] No.44460801{4}[source]
    Yes, imagine if air search radar was good enough to see the "wake" of the aircraft so that even if the plane was invisible you could just locate and track its effect on the atmosphere...