1. Radar cross sections. 2. Radar-Testing. 1. Title. TK6580.K653 1993 621.3848---dc20 92-43286 CIP This book is dedicated to the console-bound RCS test range Radar Operator. Committed by his job to the routine collection of other people's data, he seldom experiences the thrill of collecting his own.
PrefaceThe 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.It also seems appropriate advice for young engineers, although Greeley was neither when he issued this particular admonition. Practice tells us that Radar Cross Section Measurements is not the first text on ReS measurements, vii viii Preface and theory tells us that it will not be the last. And if there is any horse sense at all in the book, it will be that the why of RCS testing is probably more important than the how. If we can understand the why, Mr. Greeley probably would have admitted, we can always find a way to apply existing technology, whatever it may be at the time, to the how. Although advances in technology may change the how, they cannot significantly influence the why.The original plan for the book listed 16 chapters~three more than this published version contains~and the first draft actually had all 16. But without realizing it, Van Nostrand Reinhold editors found it necessary to apply Greeley's principle to the production of the book. Theory demanded that it be comprehensive, and therefore fat, but practice dictated that it be affordable. Horse sense and three chapters comprise the difference. The missing chapters dealt with bistatic RCS measurements, range preparation requirements, and test-plan development.The objective of what remains is to present and defend the facts~and occasionally the conjecture~governing good RCS measurement pr...
