It seems to me that you could easily create a buoy with radar, capable of reporting back to base via satellite. This would have obvious military and commercial aviation purposes. You could cover all the seas with a network of these buoys for a fairly low price I should think.
Why hasn’t this already happened for commercial aviation? And why hasn’t it happened for military aviation - a bomber dropping a bunch of these seems a lot cheaper than AWACS, and I know they have that technology for sonar. I got the idea from the 50s concept of picket subs, y’see…
RADAR is line of sight, so a low in the water buoy is not going to give much of a detecting range, and none in heavy seas. Ships with masts can get much higher above the water.
End of the day, there are better solutions - AWACS, thermal satellite imaging, sonar pickets (ASW aircraft drop sonar buoys), ship based RADAR.
I’m not quite clear on what problem you’re trying to solve. Are you talking about tracking commercial airliners over the ocean? Because there’s other ways of doing that, like with a constellation of satellites.
Or do you mean tracking hostile warplanes over the ocean? I’m no expert, but the military radar systems I know of take quite a bit of power. I can’t see how you could supply buoys with enough power to last a long time and also be effective radars.
Both, actually. With respect to the civilian satellite solution, it’ll work but there isn’t the fidelity there to get really creative with flight routing.
With regard to both circumstances and teh need for power - you can use RTGs or even nuclear reactors I should think.
It works just fine. The satellites are only the means of communicating the aircraft’s GPS position as broadcast from the aircraft itself, the satellites don’t need to have any great “fidelity” of their own. A similar system is in use in Australia except they use ground based receiver stations. It is a much cheaper solution than a radar.
This sounds like a maintenance nightmare. I guess you could relieve quite a bit of it with synthetic aperture radar but still, salt water and even worse, salt fog, routinely destroy. It’s a constant battle. This battle will cost a lot in having people go out all the time to maintain the system.
The buoy, even if its a large one, will not be stable. Come a storm it will pitch and yaw creating such a worthless return, if it gets the chance, that you would be off than before. Maybe something larger like a deep-sea oil-rig as the platform. Those are fairly stable. But, that will add dramatically to the cost.
Great, floating nuclear reactors, free for the taking. So, are we going to have these buoys manned, or not? Even if there is a tracker on them, we would never get out there in time before the reactor was gone. Manned adds to the complexity of the design and you have to have people out there, adding dramatically to the cost.
The current implementation of GPS, and other variants which have been added on by various countries, work great. There are supplemental, ground based stations, off of Africa, Austral-Asia, USA, and the EU which make even common, commercial receivers, insanely accurate. Planes have transponders which report their position all the time as do some, but not all, ships.
Interesting, I wasn’t aware of that. Is that something like ACARS or something totally different?
If the A/C are all broadcasting their own position… then how about the buoys accumulating the info and then broadcasting it to satellites? I.e. now fergeddit about em being radar at all, what moron suggested that…
This could either use less bandwidth or broadcast more info, or a combination of the two…
Why is flight seperation over the open ocean subject to much greater minimum distances (whatever the term is) than over land now then, if this technology is so good - is one of the questions.
The technology (ADS-B) is newish, isn’t used by everyone, and requires a receiver. Satellites are expensive but ground stations are relatively cheap. I don’t know what is happening elsewhere, but in Australia ADS-B uses ground based receiver stations so there is no benefit over the ocean.
The following paragraph from that wiki page addresses some limitations to using satellites. ie delay issues and high cost resulting in minimising the transmissions.
