About: Mid-Canada Line   Sponge Permalink

An Entity of Type : owl:Thing, within Data Space : 134.155.108.49:8890 associated with source dataset(s)

Construction of the Pinetree Line had only just started when air planners started to have concerns about its capabilities and siting. By the time it detected a potential attack by jet-powered aircraft, there would be little time to do anything before the attack reached Canadian or northern U.S. cities. Additionally the Pinetree systems used "old" pulse-based radars that were fairly easy to jam and were unable to detect targets close to the ground due to scattering. Although expensive in terms of fuel use, it would be possible for Soviet bombers to evade detection by flying lower. They would eventually be seen as they approached the stations, but possibly so late that there would be no possibility of intercepting them. This made the Pinetree Line's usefulness somewhat suspect even before it

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  • Mid-Canada Line
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  • Construction of the Pinetree Line had only just started when air planners started to have concerns about its capabilities and siting. By the time it detected a potential attack by jet-powered aircraft, there would be little time to do anything before the attack reached Canadian or northern U.S. cities. Additionally the Pinetree systems used "old" pulse-based radars that were fairly easy to jam and were unable to detect targets close to the ground due to scattering. Although expensive in terms of fuel use, it would be possible for Soviet bombers to evade detection by flying lower. They would eventually be seen as they approached the stations, but possibly so late that there would be no possibility of intercepting them. This made the Pinetree Line's usefulness somewhat suspect even before it
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dbkwik:military/pr...iPageUsesTemplate
abstract
  • Construction of the Pinetree Line had only just started when air planners started to have concerns about its capabilities and siting. By the time it detected a potential attack by jet-powered aircraft, there would be little time to do anything before the attack reached Canadian or northern U.S. cities. Additionally the Pinetree systems used "old" pulse-based radars that were fairly easy to jam and were unable to detect targets close to the ground due to scattering. Although expensive in terms of fuel use, it would be possible for Soviet bombers to evade detection by flying lower. They would eventually be seen as they approached the stations, but possibly so late that there would be no possibility of intercepting them. This made the Pinetree Line's usefulness somewhat suspect even before it had become operational. Dr. W.B. Lewis, head of the AECL Chalk River Laboratories and former Chief Superintendent of the UK Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) had proposed to the Defence Research Board (DRB) a Doppler radar system that avoided both of these problems. Known today as a "forward scatter bistatic radar", it used two antennas, a transmitter and receiver, separated by about 60 km. Any aircraft flying between the antennas would be detected when it entered the beam, causing the received signal to change. Since the system relied on the speed of the aircraft to "shift" the frequency due to the Doppler effect, the radar could be aimed at static objects like the ground; although a signal would be reflected and received, since the ground is not moving this signal has no frequency shift and can be easily filtered out. Another advantage of the system is that it requires much less power to operate effectively. A conventional pulse radar spends most of its time turned off, listening for the reflections of its own signal. To ensure the reflections have enough energy to be detected, each pulse has to be extremely powerful. In a bistatic radar the signal is continually broadcasting and even tiny changes in the frequency can be seen and amplified, so a much smaller signal is needed. Compared to the existing Pinetree radars, Lewis' system would require much smaller sites and less power. The major disadvantage of the system is that it did not indicate the aircraft's location within the beam, simply an indication of which beam had been "broken". Lewis proposed a system in which two overlapping lines of stations would be set up, forming a continuous "fence". This not only allowed one of the lines to cover the dead points directly over the antennas of the other, but also allowed the location of the aircraft to be determined within 30 km depending on which pair of beams were broken – a distance well within the detection ranges of interceptor aircraft radar. Lewis' design would be able to see any aircraft from ground level up to 65,000 ft.
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