Wind Profiler

Atmospheric Wind Profiling Radar System

A windprofiler works by transmitting a pulse of radar waves up into the atmosphere and measuring the doppler shift in the return signal. I had a chance to participate in the design of one of these while working for Astronautics Corp of America back in 1992. Drs. Verner Suomi and William Birkemeier of the University of Madison and a half dozen Astronautics employees including, significantly, my father Roland Voith came together to build one of these in less than a year. I was a consultant at the time and helped design the digital portion of the radar controller and coded much of the software.

This picture (little bit fuzzy) shows the radar controller pulled out from its rack. It used a Z8000 as its main controller and three TMS32020 DSPs to process the return echo in real time. It also generated all of the radar pulse and timing signals.

Tube amplifiers! Nine of them. You could just feel the power when these babies lit up.

A field of Yagi antenni. On the left is a man by which you can judge the scale. It turns out that this antenna array should have been about 4 times larger.

Thats me in the middle of the (de-energized) field. You wouldn't want to stand there while we were transmitting though.