I

INTRODUCTION
An acoustic mirror is a passive device used to reflect and perhaps to focus
(concentrate) sound waves. Parabolic acoustic mirrors are widely used in
parabolic microphones to pick up sound from great distances, employed in
surveillance and reporting of outdoor sporting events. Pairs of large parabolic
acoustic mirrors which function as "whisper galleries" are displayed in science
museums to demonstrate sound focusing.
Between the World Wars, before the invention of radar, parabolic sound mirrors
were used experimentally as early-warning devices by military air defence forces
to detect incoming enemy aircraft by listening for the sound of their engines.
During World War 2 on the coast of southern England, a network of large
concrete acoustic mirrors was in the process of being built when the project was
cancelled due to the development of the Chain Home radar system. Many of
these mirrors are still standing.

I.

CONTENT
A.

ACOUSTIC AIRCRAFT DETECTION

Prior to World War II and the invention of radar, acoustic mirrors were built
as early warning devices around the coasts of Great Britain, with the aim of
detecting incoming enemy aircraft by the sound of their engines. The most
famous of these devices still stand at Denge on the Dungeness peninsula
and at Hythe in Kent. Other examples exist in other parts of Britain
(including Sunderland, Redcar, Boulby, Kilnsea) and Selsey Bill, and Baar
i-agaq in Malta. The Maltese sound mirror is known locally as "the ear"
(il-Widna) and appears to be the only sound mirror built outside Great
Britain.

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Figure 1: ACOUSTIC MIRRORS AT DENGE

Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_mirror#/media/File:Denge_acoustic
The Dungeness mirrors, known colloquially as the "listening ears", consist
of three large concrete reflectors built in the 1920s1930s. Their
experimental nature can be discerned by the different shapes of each of
the three reflectors: one is a long, curved wall about 16' (5 m) high by 230'
(70 m) long, while the other two are dish-shaped constructions
approximately 1316' (45 m) in diameter. Microphones placed at the foci
of the reflectors enabled a listener to detect the sound of aircraft far out
over the English Channel. The reflectors are not parabolic, but are actually
spherical mirrors. Spherical mirrors may be used for direction finding by
moving the sensor rather than the mirror; another unusual example is the
Arecibo Observatory.
Acoustic mirrors had a limited effectiveness, and the increasing speed of
aircraft in the 1930s meant that they would already be too close to deal
with by the time they had been detected. The development of radar put an
end to further experimentation with the technique. Nevertheless, there
were long-lasting benefits. The acoustic mirror programme, led by Dr
William Sansome Tucker, had given Britain the methodology to use
interconnected stations to pin point the position of an enemy in the sky.
The system they developed for linking the stations and plotting aircraft
movements was given to the early radar team and contributed to their
success in World War II; although the British radar was less sophisticated
than the German system, the British system was used more successfully.
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B.

MODERN USES
Parabolic acoustic mirrors called "whisper dishes" are used as participatory
exhibits in science museums to demonstrate focusing of sound. Examples
are located at Ontario Science Centre, Baltimore's Maryland Science
Center, Oklahoma City's Science Museum Oklahoma, San Francisco's
Exploratorium, the Science Museum of Minnesota and Parkes Observatory
in Australia. A pair of dishes, typically 6 to 10 feet in diameter, are installed
facing each other, separated by hundreds of feet. A person standing at the
focus of one can hear another person speaking in a whisper at the focus of
the other, despite the wide separation between them.
Parabolic microphones depend on a parabolic dish to reflect sound coming
from a specific direction into the microphone placed at the focus. They are
extremely directional; sensitive to sounds coming from a specific direction.
However they generally have poor bass response because a dish small
enough to be portable cannot focus long bass wavelengths. Small portable
parabolic microphones are used to record wildlife sounds such as
birdsongs, in televised sports events to pick up the conversations of
players, such as in the huddle during American Football games, or to
record the sounds of the sport, and in audio surveillance to record speech
without the knowledge of the speaker.

C.

HISTORY
In the Denge region, in Kent, England, the coastal landscape is filled with
strange concrete constructions that look both decadent and futuristic. The
explanation is simple. The place harboured, at the beginning of last
century, a RAF base, where the first experiments of aerial detection were
made, and the strange constructions were actually collossal acoustic
mirrors, thatnow abandoned.
It all started around 1915, when the Royal Air Force decided to create a
defense system that would detect the aerial aproximation to the English
territory. For that, a huge network of listening sites were placed along the
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littoral border with the English Channel that had the mission of listening to
possible sounds that would come from airplane engines. Each post was
concieved as a concrete mega-structure, with reflectors with a parabolic
shape turned towards the sea, which would redirect the sound to the
microphones located in the focal point. It was basicly the same principle
that would go into the creation of today's parabolic antennas.
The system is impressive and reveals a great visionary ability, mostly if we
take into account that aeronautics, acoustics and the use of concrete were
still emerging at this point. And don't think it wasn't effective - because it
was.
Throughout a decade, several of these posts were built along the English
coast until the system was improved, in 1930. A new type of reflector was
invented, more comprehensive and precise: a hemispheric wall, 60 metres
wide and 10 metres tall. The detection ability of this new infrastructure was
amazing. A person located at the focal point would be able to listen to the
sound of an airplane engine 10 Km away and, with the help of
microphones and ampliphiers, the range would go up to 32 Km.
The original plan was to build acoustic mirrors of this kind for every 40 km
along the coastal line, with smaller parabolic reflectors in between.
However, in the mid-1930s, the invention of radar and the rising speed of
airplanes rendered this system obsolete. The military soon abandoned this
idea, but left the posts built intact. The Denge complex is one of the best
kept ones today and includes three reflectors, two parabolics, with a 6metre and 9-metre radius each, and a huge 60-metre wall.
D.

SOUND AND VISION

On the roughs above Hythe in Kent, on Ministry of Defence land, stands a
30 foot high concrete ear. Borne on a frame of umbrella-shaped iron rods,
the disc is angled towards the sky, ready to catch any sounds that come its
way. The sound mirror looks out over the flat expanse of Romney Marsh,
and miles out to sea (France is just 23 miles away), once assigned the task
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of monitoring the sky over the English Channel. In 1923, when the mirror
was built, it was hoped that in the event of an attack it would pick up the
engine noises of enemy aircraft out at sea; an improbable yet innovative
early warning defence system. The sounds of the plane would bounce
back to the focal point of the mirror, where a waiting operator would be
alerted the presence of planes. Picking up sounds up to 15 minutes before
the unaided ear, this bought crucial time for anti-aircraft defences to be
activated. This stretch of coast had long been on the frontline of defence
against invaders, and the mirror overlooks the remains of the solid, brickbuilt Napoleonic Martello towers which stud the coastline below; the nearby
Royal Military Canal, similarly built to withstand the threat of French attack,
is just out of eyeshot.
The mirror worked on a similar concept to the modern TV receiver, except
with sound waves instead of radio waves, and was the latest in a series of
attempts by the military to harness the potential of sound. Experiments had
started during WWI, when the possible dangers of devastating airborne
attack was realised, and similar technology included sound ranging to
detect enemy guns as well as listening wells. A 1916 account of tests of a
sound mirror considered the invention to be a success: A man 100m
distant, reading a newspaper in a low voice was heard perfectly. Airplanes
were heard up to distances of 8 kilometers.
Precursors to the concrete mirrors were cut directly into the chalk of the
Kent hills, and there were experiments with acoustic mirrors at Hythe
before the 1923 mirror; an earlier 20 foot cast concrete mirror had been
built alongside a building lab, workshop, store and provisions for technical
assistance to live on site. An acoustic research station was also built at
nearby West Hythe.
When the potential of the sound mirrors was proven it was claimed that
they could capture up to ten times for sound than unaided ears plans
were made for lines of discs to be erected around the coast. A 30 foot high
mirror was built at Abbots Cliff near Dover in 1929 and a 200 foot mirror at
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Denge, near Dungeness, with microphones positioned on the forecourt to

capture noise, was completed in 1930 (two, smaller mirrors had also been
built at the site beforehand). Building materials were carried along the
coast to the latter by the miniature Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch railway,
a passenger train which was itself later put to military use during the
second world war.
For one reason or another the inconveniences of wind and rain,
increased noise and the advent of faster planes the sound mirrors never
saw action (like the Martello Towers and Royal Military Canal before them).
They were abandoned in the 1930s in favour of radar, and orders were
made for them to be destroyed.
These orders were never carried out. Today, the Hythe sound mirror has
faded into the Kent hills, camouflaged into the landscape and rendered
nearly inaccessible by a thicket of head-high thorns and nettles, overrun
with rabbits. The mirror is slowly crumbling into the hillside and now
resembles a part-eaten biscuit, with a chunk taken out of the side. The
structure might have been abandoned and the technology made
obsolescent, but the most striking thing about the site today is its
extraordinarily rich sonic landscape. The entire hillside hums as breeze
sweeps through the trees and long grass, the thistles creak in the wind and
grasshoppers rub their legs together. Birds take turns to fill the air with their
coded language: from high peep-peeps and chchchs to the woo-woowooing of the wood pigeon. Sheep intermittently in call and response. This
natural background noise is occasionally punctuated by the rumbling of a
distant, out of sight plane, the distant bark of a dog or the brief revving of a
boy racer and sirens on the coast road below.
E.

IN ENGLAND
In the days before radar, Britains best hope of detecting German bombers
hidden by the cover of darkness or cloud during the First World War was
simply to listen out for the enemy aircraft as they approached over the
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channel. The military did have some primitive technology to help them,
however: concrete sound mirrors built along the coast, that helped
concentrate and amplify the noise of the engines.
Sixteen were built, but while some have survived it was thought that other
historically important examples had been lost forever until this year. Now
two are being unearthed and restored after being covered in soil and
rubble for decades. The eldest of the two sound mirrors located in Fan Bay,
just over a mile away from the white cliffs of Dover, was constructed in
either 1917 or 1918, while the second is an interwar construction dating
from between 1921 and 1929.
The imposing constructions stood 15ft to 20ft high and were carved into
chalk, then covered in concrete as it has good reflective properties. They
worked by concentrating sound waves to a central point, and were manned
by trained operators listening through a stethoscope to distinguish between
the different sounds being picked up and identify potential threats up to 25
miles away.
The mirrors were a component of one of the worlds first early-warning
systems, the London Air Defence Area, but became obsolete with the
development of radar, leading to the remaining structures falling into a
state of disrepair. Archaeologists previously believed the two standing at
Fan Bay had been destroyed in the 1970s during an attempt to clean up
the local area by the council. However, in May 2014 the National Trust
discovered that they had been buried under 600 cubic metres of soil and
rubble.
Keith Parfitt, a local archaeologist from Canterbury Archaeological Trust,
said: I have known the area since I was a teenager and remember seeing
the sound mirrors before they were buried in the 1970s. It is still a matter of
deep regret to me that so much was demolished in Dover during this time,
so it has been very rewarding to help the team at the White Cliffs
rediscover the sound mirrors this year. He added: I cannot wait to stand
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on the landscape and admire the sound mirrors once they are fully
exposed; they will be a real point of interest for visitors.
The excavation work is being carried out by three archaeologists and a
group of 50 volunteers, with machinery removing surface materials before
more delicate digging is conducted closer to the mirrors. Little is known
about the origins of sound mirrors. It is believed an experimental device
was built at Detling Aerodrome in Kent in 1915, although it no longer
survives, and there is no inventor credited with the idea.
The land was bought by the National Trust in 2012 after a public appeal
raised 1.2m. Jon Barker, a visitor experience manager at the White Cliffs,
said it was a significant national discovery and we hope that visitors will be
as amazed as us at their survival.
F.

RADAR ORIGIN
The history of radar starts with experiments by Heinrich Hertz in the late
19th century that showed that radio waves were reflected by metallic
objects. This possibility was suggested in James Clerk Maxwell's seminal
work on electromagnetism. However, it was not until the early 20th century
that systems able to use these principles were becoming widely available,
and it was German inventor Christian Hlsmeyer, who first used them to
build a simple ship detection device intended to help avoid collisions in fog
(Reichspatent Nr. 165546). Numerous similar systems, which provided
directional information to objects over short ranges, were developed over
the next two decades.
The development of systems able to produce short pulses of radio energy
was the key advance that allowed modern radar systems to come into
existence. By timing the pulses on an oscilloscope, the range could be
determined and the direction of the antenna revealed the angular location
of the targets. The two, combined, produced a "fix", locating the target
relative to the antenna. In the 19341939 period, eight nations developed
independently, and in great secrecy, systems of this type: the United
Kingdom, Germany,
the United
States,
the
USSR, Japan,
the Netherlands, France, and Italy.
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G.

BASIC PRINCIPLE
The electronic principle on which radar operates is very similar to the
principle of sound-wave reflection. If you shout in the direction of a soundreflecting object (like a rocky canyon or cave), you will hear an echo. If you
know the speed of sound in air, you can then estimate the distance and
general direction of the object. The time required for an echo to return can
be roughly converted to distance if the speed of sound is known.
Radar uses electromagnetic energy pulses in much the same way. The
radio-frequency (RF) energy is transmitted to and reflected from the
reflecting object. A small portion of the reflected energy returns to the radar
set. This returned energy is called an ECHO, just as it is in sound
terminology. Radar sets use the echo to determine the direction and
distance of the reflecting object. The word radar is a contraction of radio
Detecting And Ranging As implied by this contraction, radars are used to
detect the presence of an aim (as object of detection) and to determine its
location. The contraction implies that the quantity measured is range. While
this is correct, modern radars are also used to measure range and angle.
The following figure shows the operating principle of primary radar. The
radar antenna illuminates the target with a microwave signal, which is then
reflected and picked up by a receiving device. The electrical signal picked
up by the receiving antenna is called echo or return. The radar signal is
generated by a powerful transmitter and received by a highly sensitive
receiver.

H.

INSTRUMENTED RANGE
Ranging is the distance of the aim is determined from the running time of
the high-frequency transmitted signal and the propagation speed of light (
c 0 ). The actual range of a target from the radar is known as slant range.
Slant range is the line of sight distance between the radar and the object
illuminated. While ground range is the horizontal distance between the
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emitter and its target and its calculation requires knowledge of the target's
elevation. Since the waves travel to a target and back, the round trip time
is divided by two in order to obtain the time the wave took to reach the
target. Therefore the following formula arises for the slant range:
R=

t delayc 0
2

is the slant range

t delay

is the time taken for the signal to travel to the target and

return
c0

is the speed of light (approximately 3*10e8 m/s)

If the respective running time

t delay

is known, then the distance R

between a target and the radar set can be calculated by using this
equation.
1.

Direction
The angular determination of the target is determined by the
directivity of the antenna. Directivity, sometimes known as the
directive gain, is the ability of the antenna to concentrate the
transmitted energy in a particular direction. An antenna with high
directivity is also called a directive antenna. By measuring the
direction in which the antenna is pointing when the echo is received,
both the azimuth and elevation angles from the radar to the object or
target can be determined.
The accuracy of angular measurement is determined by the
directivity, which is a function of the size of the antenna. Radar units
usually work with very high frequencies. Reasons for this are:
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Quasi-optically propagation of these waves.

High resolution (the smaller the wavelength, the smaller the objects
the radar is able to detect).
Higher the frequency, smaller the antenna size at the same gain.
The True Bearing (referenced to true north) of a radar target is the
angle between true north and a line pointed directly at the target.
This angle is measured in the horizontal plane and in a clockwise
direction from true north. (The bearing angle to the radar target may
also be measured in a clockwise direction from the centerline of
your own ship or aircraft and is referred to as the relative bearing.)

The antennas of most radar systems are designed to radiate energy

in a one-directional lobe or beam that can be moved in bearing
simply by moving the antenna. As you can see in the Figure 2, the
shape of the beam is such that the echo signal strength varies in
amplitude as the antenna beam moves across the target. In actual
practice, search radar antennas move continuously; the point of
maximum echo, determined by the detection circuitry or visually by
the operator, is when the beam points direct at the target. Weaponscontrol and guidance radar systems are positioned to the point of
maximum signal return and maintained at that position either
manually or by automatic tracking circuits.
In order to have an exact determination of the bearing angle, a
survey of the north direction is necessary. Therefore, older radar
sets must expensively be surveyed either with a compass or with
help of known trigonometrically points. More modern radar sets take
on this task and with help of the GPS satellites determine the north
direction independently.

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2.

Rotation speed
Rotational speed (or speed of revolution) of an object rotating
around an axis is the number of turns of the object divided by time,
specified as revolutions per minute (rpm), revolutions per second
(rev/s), or radians per second (rad/s). Rotational speed is equal to
the angular velocity (or ) divided by 2.
The symbol for rotational speed is

(the Greek lowercase letter

"omega").
When proper units are used for tangential speed v, rotational speed
, and radial distance r, the direct proportion of v to both r and
becomes the exact equation:
v =2 r w cyc
v =r wrad
An algebraic rearrangement of this equation allows us to solve for
rotational speed:
w cyc=v /2 r
w rad =v /r
3.

Accuracy
Accuracy is the degree of conformance between the estimated or
measured position and/or the velocity of a platform at a given time
and its true position or velocity. Radio navigation performance
accuracy is usually presented as a statistical measure of system
error. Accuracy should not be confused with radar resolution.

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The stated value of required accuracy represents the uncertainty of

the reported value with respect to the true value and indicates the
interval in which the true value lies with a stated probability. The
recommended probability level is 95 per cent, which corresponds to
2 standard deviations of the mean for a normal (Gaussian)
distribution of the variable. The assumption that all known correction
are taken into account implies that the errors in the reported values
will have a mean value (or bias) close to zero.
Any residual bias should be small compared with the stated
accuracy requirement. The true value is that value which, under
operational conditions, characterizes perfectly the variable to be
measured or observed over the representative time, area and/or
volume interval required, taking into account sitting and exposure.
The radar presents two kinds of accuracy: Range, Azimuth
II.

CONCLUSIONS
An acoustic mirror is a passive device used to reflect and perhaps to focus
(concentrate) sound waves. Parabolic acoustic mirrors are widely used in
parabolic microphones to pick up sound from great distances, employed in
surveillance and reporting of outdoor sporting events. Pairs of large parabolic
acoustic mirrors which function as "whisper galleries" are displayed in science
museums to demonstrate sound focusing. Between the World Wars, before the
invention of radar, parabolic sound mirrors were used experimentally as earlywarning devices by military.

13 - 12