On 14 Jul 2015 03:00:32 -0400, (George
Cornelius) wrote:

In article , Jeff Liebermann writes:
let me "see" RF. It certainly would make troubleshooting RF devices
much easier. Essentially, it would be a human eye analog implimented
with RF components. According to theory, if it works for light, it
should also work for RF. At the time, I was working at about 1GHz.
Light is about 400 THz. So, all I need is an eyeball that's 400,000
times larger than the human eye. I'll give myself a -1 for the idea.

A word: synthetic aperture. Remember the dish arrays in
the Jodie Foster movie Contact? You still need the same
scale factor - many times the wavelength - but most of a
dish array can be air.

So with the eyeball analogy, I would first reduce to the
size of the pupil - the aperture - and that is perhaps
5 mm. Times 400K gives 2000m for the same theoretical
resolution. Of course, for a 2D image you would need
an array of antennas spread over a disk of that radius.

Or just calculate directly. I think the angular
resolution of an array or a telescope in radians is
something like

0.22 * wavelength / aperture .

Multiply by about 60 to get degrees.

So for 1 Ghz (.3m) it's 0.22 * .3m / 2000m, or
33 x 10^-6 radians. About 7 seconds of arc.

George

Thanks and interesting. I discarded synthetic aperture imaging
because I assumed that either the sensor array or the object being
imaged had to be moving roughly perpendicular to each other. That
seems to be the case with SAR (synthetic aperture radar). I'll read
some more (later) as I have no experience with the technology.

--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558