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Game changer. This is going to save me so much on my monthly radar bills.
My German U-boat neighbors are seething right now.
The sonar git is still private.
Commercial radar companies HATE this one simple trick.
There are companies that offer RaaS, basically radar rentals.
Source: my company had a customer who rented a weather radar for a year to do a study on weather patterns in South America
Woah can anyone rent a weather radar? I’ve got a weather station but it’s not the same
You're lucky to have that. My radar has ads.
"You've reached your monthly tracking limit. To track additional targets, please upgrade to the Defense+ plan."
Not sure if this is a good idea. As far as I know radars operate on a regulated frequency and you need a permit to use in most countries. There was also some incident a few years ago where the beam of a radar station would clearly show up on the cloud coverage maps of weather stations because they used the same frequency.
That should never be a reason not to share open source knowledge!
Interestingly enough, this project was originally licensed under the MIT license, but Motti was advised that said license does not protect physical hardware, so it changed to the CERN-OHL-PT license. Should you elect to build your own unit, be aware that the frequencies it operates in are almost assuredly highly regulated in your legal jurisdiction.
Also be aware of anti radiation munitions if you decide to operate one of these in a warzone. Radarmen have very short battlefield lifetimes because turning on a radar without lots of electronic countermeasures (hell even with countermeasures) is basically like turning on a spotlight that says “blow me up”.
So, one of the really interesting things to me about this approach is that it offers the same asymmetric value proposition that cheap attack drones do to modern pre-drone IADS.
That is: this is a platform that costs 10-15k, and an AGM-88 of modern manufacture costs almost 900k, and a Kh-31 costs about 550k - and, just as importantly, both require a long time to manufacture. So, you could theoretically make a moderately large distributed array sprinkled over a few square kilometers, and even if they’re ALL turned on, it quickly becomes logistically infeasible to knock them all out without spending a silly quantity on antirad munitions, as well as massively attriting your stocks of antirad munitions. And if you turn like 10-25% of them on at a time and cycle through your array, the problem becomes even harder for the attacker. And if you have some sort of process or mechanism - like, oh I don’t know, figuring out how to do light aerial transport with cargo drones, or even figuring out how to mount these distributed array nodes on the drones themselves, and some sort of lightweight tether for providing power - the problem becomes a MASSIVE pain in the ass for an adversary (especially that last idea, which introduces z-axis and immediate maneuverability, such that the array could feasibly detect and altogether avoid an incoming antirad munition).
And that’s the paradigm of modern warfare - not just drones, but also networked and attritable systems that maintain functionality when elements are taken offline
adding to this. I imagine that the emitter by itself costs a fraction, so set-up a huge array of these dumb emitters, and a few active systems randomly within that array. You'd essentially create an interdiction zone.
You'd end up jamming yourself. You can't really have radars or other strong electromagnetic warfare devices near each other operating on the same frequency since they tend to interfere and wash out each other's signals.
As a decoy makes sense though since you can send them far away on a drone or something.
You can if they're all synced up together
I think this is just the wrong intuition. Not a faulty one, but one which is mostly the same as the doctrine which is being exposed as entirely ineffective.
US military doctrine is the "towards complexity" doctrine such that your opponent also needs to follow you into complexity. This worked for the US in the post WWII era because it was coupled with an exponentially increasing economic output.
Whats being show, as doctrine, is "away from complexity" and "towards distributed" approach to warfighting ends up being far more effective.
So coming from, practically, 100 years of "more advanced more complicated technology and approaches are better" being doctrine, its understandable to want to add complexity to systems.
I can’t help but think this shift in doctrine could lead to the fall of an empire, with a new ideology in power rising from its ashes. We saw a very similar pattern during WWI, where changing doctrines led to an imperial collapse and paved the way for a new ideology taking power.
We might be on the verge of seeing history repeat itself.
That's just not how phased array systems work. The system we're talking about needs to have excruciatingly tight and correct timings regarding signal transmission and reception. These are beam forming systems, so a multidimensional array of antenna are using to steer the beam, using constructive and destructive interference to "point" the energy where you want it to go. That alone requires extremely tight timing. That's coupled with a phased array receiver system, so that you can detect very slight changes in the wavelength/ speed of the return signal to apply the doplar effect to detect things like motion. The github states that this system operates at 10.5 GHz, of which one RF cycle is about 95 ps, ~2.5cm. This puts the practical per-element beamforming granularity/error budget is very much in that sub-picosecond to picosecond-equivalent range. That would be practically impossible for anything but a coupled system.
Not completely impossible, I mean, probably US military systems exist in a decoupled system. But its technologically way, way way harder because timings need to be nano to pico second correct.
Maybe they could be synced using RF over fiber. This has been proposed as candidate technology for 6g wireless networks, to enable cell free massive MIMO.
That would mean that you would need to run optical fiber to each of them, though we've already seen fiber drones spool out kilometers of the stuff as they fly.
EDIT: I just remembered this interesting article about doing radio interferometry over a fiber network using cheap quartz oscillators instead of atomic clocks. My (layman's) understanding is that the quartz oscillators are good enough over a few milliseconds, but will fall out of sync with each other over longer time spans. Meanwhile the fiber optic reference signal (distributed from a central atomic clock) can be kept correct on average by reflecting the reference back down the fiber and doing active correction of the changing path length (caused by thermal fluctuations and vibrations along the fiber) but will be incorrect on a millisecond-to-miliscond basis because of light speed lag and the path length being a moving target. So they use the quartz oscillators over small time scales and use the fiber reference signal to keep them synced over long time scales. Surprisingly the article says they actually get a better sync this way than with using multiple atomic clocks.
So perhaps something like that is possible.
Unless I'm missing something in your plan i don't think that would work well. If these radar stations aren't surrounded by very serious defensive systems for hundreds of miles in every direction, then they'll simply be blown up by dumb howitzer shells that only cost around 2000 dollars.
Howitzers are cheap, relatively long range, mobile, and accurate enough. If you don't have strong enough defenses to prevent the howitzers from moving into range, then they'll just blow up all your radar stations with cheap shells.
The locating them is the problem I think
Locating the radar base station? No that's the easiest part. Radar is like turning on a Hollywood style searchlight pointing up into the sky. The instant you turn it on its extremely obvious where the radar searchlight is coming from
Why suddenly are these required to be taken out by anti rad munitions?
It's radar. They're practically setting off a beacon of their location through operation.
No I'm not disagreeing with you on the principle and have been making the exact same argument about scaling and cost in regards to the US defense doctrine for years. But there is no special munitions required to take out a small radar system, which is basically a bunch of highly sensitive electronics which must be exposed for the instrument to work. Any basic quad drone with a reasonable payload could easily take one out.
This doesn't detract from you main point, which I entirely agree with and have been promoting for years.
If everyone who studied this went into medicine instead of death…
The system being discussed is not explicitly or exclusively useful in military contexts. There are a LOT of places where advanced beam forming and radar capabilities could be useful outside of that. Not to mention: in military applications, this is pretty definitely a defensive system.
This is absolutely a thing. I remember reading a story about this, this was years ago, but this guy worked for the air force of some nation in heavy conflict. One of the most used weapons in this war was an anti-radiation missile, it would loiter for some time until it detected an emissions target then lock on and destroy it. Whenever they needed to use radar, they would hotwire a bunch of microwave ovens to work with the door open, then plug them in with like six extension cords plugged together. The missiles would lock right onto those microwave ovens and blow them up. He was joking about how the enemy would boast they destroyed 15 aircraft that week on the ground, when his force only had 10 aircraft to begin with.
So what you are saying is one single Styropyro Macro-wave will suffice?
Hmm, considering how cheap these are to make (relatively speaking) could it make a good decoy? Basically set a bunch of these up in random places away from anything important with remote on switches and when missiles start flying power them up one at a time. They're more expensive than the anti-missile drones (those are supposedly about $1000 a piece) but they might be more effective in their own way.
Possibly but you could just put any radio signal up for a decoy, you don’t need something this fancy. Radar is just radio waves. The fancy part is collimation of the beam and sensing of the return beam. That’s what costs money.
ITT: A bunch of people who think they know a lot about radar, expect to run their own radar at home, and think they can do it better for cheaper.
Honestly if I have fun building it then I'll spend 80 to build my own but if I need it right now then I'll probably buy a ready made one. It's basically the difference between my home pc and the mac I use for office work.
Ukraine: "Write that down! WRITE THAT DOWN!"
This doesn't have any practical application in Ukraine.
Ukraine detects FPV drones with numerous distributed and networked microphone/acoustic sensors. You're not going to get any cheaper than a used phone paired with a $2 USB solar panel.
The larger Shahed/Geran and above stuff isn't limited by radar detection. What they need are cheap interceptors to deal with swarm attacks.
Radars are very much in use in Ukraine. There is a whole range of air targets besides FPV drones, there are ballistic missiles, fighter planes, bomber planes, helicopters, gliding bombs, and ships, all of which require a radar to detect.
Acoustic sensors have limited range. By the time it detects a missile, it's already flew one kilometer away, and it's too late to grab your AA gun. Gliding bombs are silent.
Radars have 50+ km range, and allow to shoot bombers and ships from beyond the border with expensive US-provided missiles.
Again, this particular DIY radar has no application in Ukraine. It does not have a 50+km range (10km). It can not direct or interface with an interceptor missile, of any kind, to shoot down TBMs, Shaheds, etc. The critical issue really is how many interceptor missiles Ukraine has and far less about janky early-warning radar coverage.
Acoustics are used for FPVs, which have a tiny radar cross section and can fly at tree top altitude or lower. A basic/crude DIY radar would not be effective there and at $12,000 vs $Free, acoustics win hands down for FPVs. The Gepards (AA gun) have their own onboard radar already for cruise missiles/shaheds. No one is proposing or expecting acoustics to track missiles or bombs. These are two very different problems.
The Russian Navy stays way, way the hell away from the Ukraine coast these days. The drone-boat bombs have them running scared. Even Sevastopol in Crimea is too risky.
If you crack the combination of "actually cheap" and "reliable interceptor", the US military industrial complex is going to build you your very own Scrooge vault.
I've sometimes thought that WW2 flak cannons (~artillery) with a programmable fuse (set immediately before "launch" by radar) could be effective. You would get longer range than C-RAM or laser and artillery shells are cheap. Shahed/Gerans are not particularly fast or durable. It wouldn't take much to make it fall out of the sky: close enough is good enough.
The Russian Navy stays way, way the hell away from the Ukraine coast these days. The drone-boat bombs have them running scared. Even Sevastopol in Crimea is too risky.
The system is called Loki and sold by SAAB now, but well, the gun base can be an AA/Naval gun with origin from the 1930ish, but then some parts are changed to get a speed to follow drones, the original handcranked aiming systems.
Video from Swedish Defence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO4QMZ1n4_Q
The fact that Aeris-10 offers a true phased array system and ±45° elevation/azimuth adjustments are seemingly its differentiating factors. Prices for electronics are exceedingly floaty in these ship-shinking days, but a brief estimate pins the bill of materials at $5,000 for the 10N and $7,200 for the 10E.
So for $21,600 I could attempt the goal of the main characters in Twisters.
This is the real way to hurt a company. Once an open source version exists, even if it is not as good as the commercial offering, they will have trouble convincing people to pay for what they are selling.
Of course, they should be compensated for their work, but if you can build it yourself then the cost to a company does not need to be much higher than the costs of parts and labor for someone else to do it for you.
One of the things I want to do is build decent applications and release them for free so people can get the same functionality of their paid apps but not need to pay anything.
Main thing stopping me is time.
Military tech companies will be perfectly fine. They typically have 10+ year contracts, and military equipment has a huge price margin in exchange for being reliable and field-serviceable, and the main disadvantage of DIY radar is reliability (unless you also recruit the guy who built it into the army).
It will probably impact civilian market more, where the same companies will try to sell you an unnecessarily hardened machined aluminium box full of cheap Chinese electronics, camo painted for an additional ten thousand bucks.
Their next commercial offering might just be cheaper.
So what use would a private citizen or business have for a system like this? I'm not sure who the "commercial offerings" are meant for.
Im mostly speculating but the stuff that comes to mind is hunting, fishing, weather, private space company, shipping company (air and sea), and tbh even military contracting firms are also considered private commercial businesses. Radar is super useful if you can afford it
Mir first thought where "low budget" battlefields and high budget personal security.
Ahh yes.. let me just go hunting with my beamforming radar.. I'll be tracking the rate at which that deer is changing course at over 100khz.
I mean. I like cool electronic gadgets. It’d probably be fun to play with.
This would be a lot of fun for those of us who like messing with radios and antennas
this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2026
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