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Old 10th October 2024 | 08:13
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justapax
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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.
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