Why is radar hard to detect stealth aircraft while satellite telephones easily capture signals below the thermal noise floor?
In: Engineering
Think about driving your car late at night. You see a car way off in the distance. You can see its headlight brightly, but your head lights are only illuminating the road just in front of you. Your lights appear just as bright to the other driver, in order to see that car if its lights were off it needs to reflect enough light back at you for you to see, and it is only being hit with a fraction of the light your headlamps produce, since most of it doesn’t hit the other car. This is kinda the same with radar. The signal has to be sent out from the radar dish and they are looking for the tiny reflection back. A stealth aircraft isn’t designed to not interact with radar, it does. It’s just shaped in a way that most of the radar it reflects goes up and away from the source.
Edit: typos
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