trimble stealth ground plane
does anyone have an idea what's the physics of the stealth ground plane technology of trimble (h**p://www.trimble.com)? my guess: some frequency selective surface, electromagnetic/photonic bandgap structure. does anyone have more detailed info of their technology. i am very interested to know because this could mean the commercial breakthrough of this technology.
thanks
best regards
Part of the trouble in understanding the invention is the advertising department's hot air. It looks like they are using ferrite loaded foam (a several decade old technology) to damp out some antenna modes. They are using multiple feeds on the patch to keep the phase center constant with azimuth.
This antenna is used in a system where one receiving station is placed at a known location to obtain the errors in the measurements that can be applied to another station at another unknown location.
This is also an old technology. Boat harbors have such a system where they transmit the error corrections on a know frequency to the boats approaching the harbor.
Old stealths relied on jamming incoming waves from radars so they come as noise back to radars.
New stealths rely not only on jamming but also in reflection of wave,at that particular frequency, similar of reflection of light in optics so the reflected beam will be polarized along a direction parallel to the surface of the plane (brewster angle).
Who knows what material and who knows what is the mechanism that can make that possible.
Assuming a perfect stealth, traveling few kilometers above, not even a naked eye can see the plane in the air. Can it be done?
NASA in USA fixed robots on planet Mars surface I think it can be done.
Usually army has comparable money then my budget (I daydream!) and is manifacturing fantastic projects in their labs. They are 5-10years ahead of time in technology.