CRJ 200 Radar - Insights?

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best piece of advise: if you dont like what you see, turn the gain down till you see what you want to see.

all jokeing aside, using airborne radar is as much an art form as it is a math problem. start with your basic rules of thumb and play around with what works.
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Quote: best piece of advise: if you dont like what you see, turn the gain down till you see what you want to see.

all jokeing aside, using airborne radar is as much an art form as it is a math problem. start with your basic rules of thumb and play around with what works.
I do wish they did a better job of teaching this stuff to new hires. In the old days you got to learn to use it flying night cargo 135 or something like that. Now they come straight from seminoles to the jet with no clue as to how or why it works, and when and why it won't work.

I agree, it could be considered an art form... sadly, it is becomming a lost art as more and more people deviate around cities instead of weather.
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One of the best times to get comfortable with your radar is to turn it on when the weather is good and spend time working with tilt/gain/features. VFR days with isolated cells are an excellent way to correlate what you can see outside with what the radar is painting inside. Bodies of water, big cities, and shorelines can provide opportunites for learning tilt management and ranging.
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Quote: One of the best times to get comfortable with your radar is to turn it on when the weather is good and spend time working with tilt/gain/features. VFR days with isolated cells are an excellent way to correlate what you can see outside with what the radar is painting inside. Bodies of water, big cities, and shorelines can provide opportunites for learning tilt management and ranging.
Yes ! until you get a job in a 121 carrier............ you don't get to choose the VFR days......hahah (just kidding) and again the CRJ has a pretty good radar, I don't know how some people can complain about it, I mean, either they were flying a B777 before or this is the first time they use an airborne radar and expect everything to be perfect and automatic. The CRJ radar does a pretty damn good job painting cells in the "shadow" with once and a while atenuation (minimal). Anybody here used to the old Bendix 140s and 160s? (they would know what I'm talking about)
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Quote: The CRJ radar does a pretty damn good job painting cells in the "shadow" with once and a while atenuation (minimal). Anybody here used to the old Bendix 140s and 160s? (they would know what I'm talking about)
In my charter days in the aerostar all we had was a parabolic antenea and a monochrome screen. If you were flying in any kind of precip at all you would just see attenuation on the nose. You had to fly towards the area with the least shadows.

When I got on the dash everyone was complaining how bad the radar was. I could not believe how nicely it worked. The dash does not have a calibrated gain swith, like I said in the previous post. There are not even any tick marks on the gain knob. It does have a feature that I always use that highlights the areas of shadowing in blue. I am sure the RJ's have this feature right?
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Quote: Hello,



If so, why is it that at +1.0 or +0.7 at 80NM range you can get ground clutter? Isn't that supposed to be 8000 feet up or down at 1.0 TILT?



-schone
The reason you get stuff like that, at least at my old job, was that the mechanics hardly ever calibrated the radars when they would work on them. They would just eyeball it and bolt it in. Each one would be a little different and you would have to calibrate the zero tilt yourself if you felt so inclined.
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Quote: sadly, it is becomming a lost art as more and more people deviate around cities instead of weather.

HA HA! Good I'm not the only one to see someone want to divert from Memphis because he is painting the airport, or divert ALL THE WAY AROUND LAKE ERIE on a cloudless night because he is painting the lake....
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What I will never understand are the Captains that turn the Gain up to +2 or even +3, and then want to avoid all red spots. Jezus, Gain +2 or +3??? You gonna be paintin a whole lotta red and purple!

Half the time, it's not even weather that they want "10 degrees to the right" to avoid. I actually had one guy want to deviate for a 'purple' spot he was painting. Never mind the fact his Gain was +3 and it was just GROUND he was painting. Ugh. People.
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The reason people turn the gain up so high is to see if that stuff is attenuating. The arc segment which is supposed to identify attenuation NEVER, EVER works, you have to do it the old-fashioned way. Turn that gain up and determine whether you can see ground out behind that rain. If you can't see ground, don't fool with that part of the storm.

This radar is extremely underpowered, no amount of math will ever change the fact that it basically bites.
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Quote: HA HA! Good I'm not the only one to see someone want to divert from Memphis because he is painting the airport, or divert ALL THE WAY AROUND LAKE ERIE on a cloudless night because he is painting the lake....
C'mon Moon! Water diffuses and scatters radar. You can't paint the water, only the surrounding land mass.
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