Radar Site Blind Spots From Terrain

[Taylor Broad]

Hey Ross (and others),

 

I am right now setting up some facility files for Honolulu Control Facility and had a question about the radars. With my knowledge of how radar works, I know that blind spots caused by terrain exist. I was wondering when and if we can get a feature which allows for me to define these radar blind spots so targets do not show up when they hit an exclusion zone of sorts.

 

Thanks

[Dominic Nguyen]

Only way so far is for you to get the correct elevation for that site, then use arc tangent with the surrounding terrain for your slope.

[Andrew Wolcott 814793]

I'm doing some testing regarding multiple radars.

 

The idea essentially is to define multiple radars with differing ranges, elevations and slopes to create the radar deadzones.

 

Basically it's creating blackholes between radar sites. While this functionality will work in vERAM, it will only work on vSTARS using multi-site mode, which changes the datablock and tag representation.

 

Comparing aircraft position to a digital terrain model (these are free) should not be that difficult I would imagine.

 

I've been a proponent of Ross developing "Stock Radar Types" which can be selected by the FE, and all the FE needs to do is select the lat/long location, elevation and "radar type."

 

Ross would have to implement code for each radar to properly simulate the curvature of the earth so that each radar has a "radar horizon."

 

This is doable, but I'm not sure of Ross' willingness to implement something which he personally feels is overkill for the purposes of VATSIM.

 

Maybe one day?

[Dominic Nguyen]

If he can come up with things like MSAW volumes that trigger alerts, I don't see why blindspots should be too hard.