Eli5: Why do radar antenna still need to spin?

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Eli5: Radar are built to spin around, send out, and capture a signal to create a 360 degree image of the surrounding area that regularly updates.

One would think that you could build a stationary antenna that electronically pulses and limits the area it is searching to do the same thing, removing the complication of the moving parts.

Why isn’t this the norm? And is it even possible?

In: Engineering

23 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

basically the same reason we let lawn sprinklers rotate with maybe one or two outlets instead of a static one with i.e. 12 in total.
you also would have to consider inevitable black spots in a static configuration. which you could counter through overlap thus making it even more inefficient economically.

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