Abstract
This paper introduces a simple two-dimensional ray-tracing visual tool, Ray-VT, for simulating propagations in the tropospheric environment. It is capable of tracing ray paths through range-dependent refractive conditions as well as arbitrary terrain cases. The fundamental computations are based on the piece-wise application of Snell’s law including a small angle approximation. The Ray-VT can be used to investigate the effects of ducting propagations and to assess the performances of radar systems. It can also be used as an educational aid for understanding the propagation characteristics in complex environments.
Highlights
The guidelines for radar and other radio communication systems are usually based on standard tropospheric conditions
Several numerical models for tropospheric EM propagation predictions have been developed, in which the most popular methods rely on ray tracing [1,2,3,4,5,6,7] and the parabolic equation (PE) [8,9,10,11]
Ray tracing is not capable of giving the exact field strength/phase in complex environments, it does provide a useful tool for illustrating tropospheric refraction effects, for example giving a real-time digital map of the rigorous ray trajectories between the transmitter and the receiver
Summary
The guidelines for radar and other radio communication systems are usually based on standard tropospheric conditions. Dividing the propagation medium into a set of homogeneous layers and assuming the refractivity in each layer changes linearly, the rays in these layers are the arcs of circles and the direction of a ray, when it goes through a layer boundary, changes continuously [16] This constant-gradient approximation method has gained wide application in the EM community, such as in the radio physical optics (RPO) propagation model [17] and the advanced propagation model (APM) [18]. In these propagation models, the ray-tracing processes are only performed for range-independent refractive environments for computing grazing angles and/or the propagation losses in the upper propagation regions.
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