Re: Streamer Growth

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "Jim Lux by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <jimlux-at-earthlink-dot-net>

> > >
> > > Dopler trafic radar probibly wont work. You would nead some type of
pulse
> > > imiging radar. A small 3cm lab radar or fire control radar  should
work as
> > > it would have sufficent resolution for small tests.
> > >    Robert  H
>
> >         I think you could get a pretty good idea of streamer growth by
> watching
> > the variation of the echo amplitude with time.  As for resolution, to
> > get 1 foot resolution you need a bandwidth of around 500 to 600 MHz, and
> > that's quite another matter......
>
> ...to put it another way:
>
> Roughly 1 nS/foot
>

only if you try and do it in a one shot measurement short pulse.  There are
a variety of ways to get "superresolution imaging" at < wavelength (or
1/bandwidth, roughly the same...), pretty much relying on a series of
measurements (all tied to power and bandwidth and time... that BT product
thing..) Yes, there is an issue of coherence length and time for the pulse
compression, but, there might be a way to back it out.  Think of speckle
processing on astronomical video to get superresolution.   I'm not saying it
would be easy, or even practical, but the possibility of RF imaging the "ion
cloud" around the topload is one that deserves some thought.