Radar Operation Pulse

[Manock]

Discovered something interesting about the 360 degree radar set.

It pulses.

The radar apparently transmits a pulse in all directions every ten seconds or so, & you have to have your receiving antenna pointed in the direction of the target beforehand.

No wonder that radar operator looks so intense on that direction wheel.

In other words. If you try manually operating the set, its easy to miss the blip if the pulse doesnt match your target bearing.

So if you know where your target is, say at 35 degrees, and have your receiver pointed at 35 degrees, you will only see a short lived blip approx. every ten seconds. How maddening.

The operator will always be wondering if he missed a contact based on the chance the targets bearing didnt match the radars pulse - receiving antennae alignment.

I guess operators would pulse, look, turn wheel, pulse, look, turn wheel with the added complication their doesnt appear to be any signal light on the radar set that tells you when their is a pulse. You would have to just use your own sense of timing to anticipate it. Arrgh.

Someone asked how to turn the wheel. You have to view down a bit from the standard operator view to click on the wheel numbers to turn it.

[tycho102]

I don't know specifics about German 1940's radar. But you can pulse a stronger signal out of a small waveguide, without liquid cooling. A signal so strong that several seconds would actually melt the waveguide. I have always imagined this was so, and the necessary active air-cooling would be the way to go on a submarine.

So your rotating antenna would have to be rotated at a rate that allowed strong pickup. Remeber that time out and in is on the order of 100ms.

That they modeled it within the game doesn't say all that much, unless they have also modeled the antenna accurately. The one time all this occured to me, I figured the easiest way to do things would be to just limit the rate at which you can spin the the antenna bearing. I'd expect that later radar versions could spin faster, but I've never take a watch to time a full rotation.

[Manock]

Explains that. Good that the sim bothered to model the pulse feature for realism.

Dont think SH2 bothered to do that.

It maybe would have been nice if some other way other than point & click were used to turn the wheel. Like maybe the mouse.

But heck Im still going to mainly rely on the radio operator for radar information.