Message posted by Tom on June 08, 2008 at 7:14:10 PST:
No, no, no....I said ignore the spacy thing on the top of the pylon. It's a pole cap, not the shape of a test aircraft. They are used to calibrate the radar return measurements before putting a model on the pylon. A pole cap provides essentially zero radar return, so the engineers can measure the return of the support pylon, which is small but there. THEN they put a model on the pylon and can sort of subtract out the previous measurement to get the net radar return of the model. You've seen similar shapes on other RCS facilies because they are used to calibrate the systems. Since they are just calibration shapes, there's no effort made to hide them, hence the presence of pictures.
In Reply to: Re: It's Helendale RCS! posted by JoeinTX on June 07, 2008 at 23:46:18 PST:
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