[Study Help] Basic Radar Plotting Aid

Well, they gave my calculator a good once over when I was there earlier.

As to the age of the staff, I don’t believe there was anyone working at the REC who wasn’t already eligible for retirement. A career there isn’t exactly a growth opportunity.

Bought my TI-59 and printer a few days after taking my Unlimited Master’s exam in 1978. Carried it with me until retirement 2 years ago. Wrote many a Stability & Trim, Payroll, GC, Mercator, etc. program using that 1000 stroke (1K) limitation and the magnetic cards. Hard to believe these days with 1TB flash drives! Anyway in the late '80s, before widespread ARPA implementation, I observed my junior mates struggling with onscreen plotting with the silly notched ruler and grease pencil plotting. I decided to write a radar program in C. Granted they would have to run back into the chartroom and enter the parameters into the computer but what the hell. Over the years I re-wrote and re-wrote the program as C became C+, C++, Borland C, Microsoft C++, etc. And of course the operating systems changed which also affected how the program would run - or not run. Hah! Anyway here’s a working version of the program (though not the “latest” as the latest would not run under my current ver of Win 10)? Sorry for a few graphic glitches - but you can get the idea.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/13lucytijlsscyc/new_target.exe?dl=0
And, as all you professionals know, the same math applies to True Wind and Station Changing problems so I applied the same methodology to write programs for those problems.

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Cool. Would you mind sharing the source, so I can see how your trig compares to my own? I’m especially interested to see if you have a more elegant way than tangent to get the slope of the target vector. I thought about porting to c so I could add comments, which would make the code much more interesting to someone who hasn’t already worked out a solution.

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When in the navy we used the Battenberg plotter mark 5. It gave a much more accurate and faster result of relative velocity problems than the fluorescent pencils and plotting sheets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battenberg_course_indicator)

NIH…

I remember now that I wrote the Maneuvering Board program first during convoy ops in the Korea Strait in '88 with a bunch of Navy reservists doing their “Convoy Commodore” acdutra. The radar program came later.

Here’s the C source code for the radar program and the maneuvering board program. Hope they still compile? Had to tweak and recompile them each time the operating systems changed. The first versions ran under MSDOS!


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And here’s working version of the Maneuvering Board program. Well it works on Win 10.