When I have finished some other things I've been working on I will start on my second radar mod. The first one released about a week ago seems to have worked OK. There are a number of things I would like to address with this second mod, namely:
- Increase resolution of the radar screen.
- Add bearing numbers round the outside of the scope.
- Add bearing lines and range rings.
- Stop contacts appearing ahead of the sweep.
- Change the contacts so that they appear arced, instead of blobs.
- Add a digital range readout to appear at the bottom of the scope.
- Add a digital bearing readout to appear at the bottom of the scope.
I have done quite a bit of reading and with help from LukeFF and past forum posts, I think I know what the radar should look like. There are however some technical things I am not sure about.
The radar manual says that the bearing resolution is 5 degrees and the range resolution is 40 yards. Does anyone know if this 5 degrees referes to the angular width of the radar beam? If that is the case, then contacts should appear as at least a 5 degree wide arc, plus the target width, but I have seen pictures of radars with much smaller arcs of 2 degrees, but there was no date to the picture. The picture I have seen of the WW2 radar PPI seems to show the arcs at 5 degrees. Also, two targets close together should be indistinguishable. The working radar sets I have seen pictures of, for example the USS Cobia do not show a visible radar sweep line - I only recall having seen the sweep line on ATC sets. Was the sweep line visible?
I am including digital bearing readout, in lieu of there being a bearing train indicator. The operator's manual also advises operators to use a piece of thread from the centre of the display to the bearing indicator to get a bearing accurate to within half a degree (I think it was half and I only read it an hour ago).
Digital readout of range to target will appear on the scope, as there is no seperate range indicator unit. It won't be 100% accurate, I plan on a range accurate to within 0.2% of the actual range - according to operator's manual actual accuracy was 0.1%. Whilst I'm on that, what's the largest range anyone has ever seen a target at on the radar?
It's entirely possible I won't be able to get any or all of this working, but I have done some testing and have some fairly workable ideas on how to accomplish all of the above, but I might run into unforseen obstacles.
I'm looking for some comments on the stats for the SJ sets, as it's a lot easier to change things before I have created anything to change.