Warmtoast,
How thick, myopic, slow off the mark and generally stupid have I been not to spot your Post before now ! Never mind, I'm on frequency now.
This seems to have been a case of Overlooking the Bleeding Obvious, but I'm not skilled enough in Radar to offer useful comment.
Yet do I remember one night in the CPN-4 at Thorney Island. The one thing worse than a radar which cannot see something which
is there is one which sees things which
aren't !
It was a warm autumn night in the bird migration season; we had a party of local ornithologists visiting the truck to watch the myriads of birds setting out South over the Channel. A twitcher looked over my shoulder, pointed to the tube and asked politely: What's
that ?
I had been asking myself the selfsame thing for a minute or so, for I was not happy with what I was seeing. About thirty miles south, in mid-channel, a faint shapeless mass was forming where no land existed. The apparition was on a broad front of some 10-15 miles and tailed out south for 5 miles or so. It was certainly not a large flock of birds, rather more like some huge Leviathan of Biblical proportions rising from the foam, or a seabed volcanic eruption (and we didn't have many of these around there).
Fascinated, and more than a little uneasy, I watched the
Thing take form and become more defined - and suddenly recognised the northern outline of the Cotentin peninsula ! But that was 40 miles further on, out of range and off my tube. Then memory stirred, and I had the answer - "skip distance". Five years before, I'd read about this at Shawbury, but never seen it. In "inversion" conditions in stable air, the radar can "bend" to follow the curvature of the earth - but the return pulse is now out of phase and fools the radar receiver into a display at half the true range. Problem solved.
Warmtoast, your:
...The night is one of those which can only be read about in a Mills and Boone novel - but is real. The warm, gentle, breeze blows off the Indian Ocean and rustles the Coconut Palm tree leaves. In the distance is the soft murmur as the rollers break on the reef. Stars shine down and seem no more than arms length away...
recalls my short idyll reported in "Military Life on the Malabar Coast..." (currently on Page 3 of "Military Aviation"): it was a nice cherry on the cake at the end of my 3½ years out there - and could well have come straight out of Mills and Boone, as you say.
Danny.