Blip, Ping, and Buzz: Making Sense of Radar and Sonar

7. Final Thoughts

Please understand that, despite the twenty-three technical notes and the intentionally broad-sweep, scatter-gun approach that I have adopted for this book, I have only scratched the surface of remote sensing techniques. Also, there are alternative versions of every single technical subject discussed in this book, from antennas, beamforming, CFAR, and Doppler processing right through to the end of the remote sensing alphabet. My aim has been to provide you with an appreciation of the processing that underpins remote sensing—whatever the application may be—at a technical level that is deeper than my “Math-Lite” approach may imply.1 So much for the technical challenges of remote sensing. Here I would like to indulge myself a little—vent a spleen, you might say, once you’ve finished reading this short chapter. As promised in “Hearing the Picture,” I will say a few words about the organizational aspects of the remote sensing industry, and about how such (in)efficient (dis)organization helps (hinders) significantly the practical implementation of working remote sensing systems. 7 Final Thoughts 1If, because of the absence of math, you doubt the technical content of this book, please glance at the Glossary. I have succeeded if most of the remote sensing words now mean something to you. (“I’ve always wondered what that meant!”) Managerial Entropy The small passenger plane was a noisy twin-propeller Fokker, with overhead wings and a very narrow fuselage. We were on our way from Edinburgh, Scotland, across the Irish Sea to Belfast, for an early morning project meeting with a partner company. I pointed out to Stuart, my supervisor, the beautiful scenery of the Scottish Isles, which at that moment formed a ring of hills around us, snow-capped and lit up by the rising sun. Stuart cast a bleary eye out of the window at this magical scenery, and remarked that the snow reminded him of the scum left behind in a bathtub. Now Stuart is one of two radar engineers that I have had the pleasure of working with whom I could describe as genuinely brilliant, a multitalented engineer and an essential member of any design team. His one professional failing (I do not include his lugubrious sense of humor) as he would readily admit —and as anyone who has worked under him would more readily admit—is that his people-management skills were AWOL. He had been promoted through technical ability to a position of management, for which he had little ability, and which diverted him from the purely technical role at which he excelled. Fast forward ten years to a different company—a very large UK-based multinational aerospace corporation. By the 1980s many radar projects were becoming behemoths and were far too large and expensive for a single company, even a multinational one, to tackle alone. We had entered the era of consortia , with different companies (often from different countries) getting together via contractual agreements of Byzantine complexity to design and build very large and very complex radar systems. In my case, our corporation formed part of an agreement to build the next generation of European fighter aircraft— the Eurofighter—and we in the radar division were in partnership with other radar divisions from other companies to build the advanced multimode pulseDoppler radar system for this beast. The end result for both airplane and radar system will be very impressive but—oh my—what a way to run a business. There are difficulties enough with consortia, since the various partners have somewhat different agendas, and because the legal entanglements (subcontracts with progress meetings and payment milestones) necessarily involve extra layers of bureaucracy. Progress is always slow. Engineers are weighed down by paperwork and paper pushers, and feel like they are wading through molasses in a snowstorm. Tempers get frayed, and fingers of blame get pointed. Add to this fraught setup the complexity of the large radar system that is being developed, with its design intricacies and real technological challenges of implementation, and you can see that (almost inevitably) a difficult labor Final Thoughts 193 precedes the birth. In our case, this situation was made worse by the multinational nature of the consortium, because different partners wanted different versions of the final product to meet different national needs. Everything I said in the preceding paragraph no doubt applies very widely in industry, and much of it is unavoidable, but it seems to many...