PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Turbulence
Thread: Turbulence
View Single Post
Old 10th October 2024 | 08:13
  #5 (permalink)  
justapax
Community Builder
Community Influencer
40 Countries Visited
25 Anniversary
 
Joined: Jan 2000
: SLF
Posts: 1,583
Likes: 312
From: UK and Italy
For those of you who don't speak Aviation-speak, X-band is 8.4 - 12,4 GHz radar and wx means weather.

Wx is an abbreviation from the days when radio communication was by morse, rx=receive tx=transmit are still used today, the other exes have fallen out of use. X-band was from WWII, the allies had the technology to transmit high-power radar at these frequencies using klystrons, the axis powers did not, so the band that was used was called X, X for secret. The other letters for frequency bands are equally cryptologic, except L ('low') band, 1240 - 1300 MHz. Some allies were confused between K and Q bands (there's no Q in Cyrillic, and the USSR were our allies in WWII, so these bands are known as Ka and Ku band.

Ku band radars can detect windshear directly, but are too short-range, heavy, thirsty, unreliable and expensive to mount inside aircraft radomes as yet. Expect to see Ku band radars in aircraft from the 2040s onwards, as the science progresses.
justapax is online now  
Reply