Codar optimizes Riversonde

email from Don Barrick

Hugh —

It didn’t take us long to get into the RiverSonde and optimize the settings after you sent the connection info to us.  Lo and behold, we are getting all the way across the Hudson!  We did this partly by reducing the sweep bandwidth to 2.5 MHz, which gives us a 60-m range cell.  However, we still have 20 range cells to span the river.  The bigger the range cell, the more SNR we get because of the larger scatter-patch echo.  We can also try smaller range cells, for higher resolution studies for a while.

Pass this along to your staff and the Stevens people.  We shouldn’t get too optimistic from a couple hours data, maybe wind/roughness conditions were just right.  We’d still like to put it on top of the Admin building at some point.  And we’d like to plan for a boat antenna pattern run.  The latter will need to be done with an active transmitter on the boat, so when Pete returns, we’ll plan for how to do this.