Antenna plugin

The antenna plug-in menu

The antenna plugin is always loaded and enabled, so these options don't appear.

You can load new antenna configuration; resave the current configuration; or save the current configuration to a new file.

So far, radR only knows about two types of antennas.  Choosing tbar automatically makes beam angle = 0.  Choosing dish automatically makes vertical and horizontal apertures equal.The tracker plugin will eventually try to connect tracks from both sides of a dish's ring-shaped field of view.

Choosing one of these options pops up the antenna controls window (see below).

This can be used to reload antenna plugin code within radR.  Rarely used.

The antenna controls window

For a dish antenna, beam angle can be used to calculate target height.

Aperture angles are not yet used.  It is likely that a tracker model will eventually need them.

Lat/long are not used, but will eventually be stored in blip movies and other files so that targets can be georeferenced.

Antenna elevation is included in calculations of 3-d blip and track coordinates.

Notes:

• radR doesn't know what combinations of these parameters make sense.  You can set the beam angle to 90, which is not very useful and will cause errors.  You can set the beam angle to a non-zero value even for a tbar.
• the radR plot window always displays data projected into the x-y plane, regardless of beam angle
• if you change the beam angle, the planar distance represented by a single sample changes.   Range rings and any underlay are also scaled to match the new representation.