How was the first radar made into a screen that produced a dot?

Question

I understand they managed to emit a sound wave that came back, but how in the world did they digitize that?

In: 4

Answer 1

Believe it or not, it wasn’t digitized. That dot on the screen is every bit as analog as an old television signal on a cathode ray tube. You’re essentially looking at an oscilloscope that traces out a line from the center to a point on the circumference of a circle in sync with the radar antenna’s rotation. There’s still a lot of electronics magic happening here, but it’s fundamentally an analog process.