A review of some developments in ray tracing at the Naval Air Development Center

Abstract

The Naval Air Development Center has a comprehensive ray-tracing program which has been extensively used for a number of years not only by our own laboratory, but also by other naval activities and private contractors . In this paper I shall present a brief overall description of the program and shall then describe in somewhat more detail the so-called Target Ray Routine , which searches for and computes the various rays which propagate from a specified source location to a specified receiver location, and combines the rays to compute an effective resultant propagation loss. This will be followed by a few comparisons of ray theory with normal mode theory and with experimental data. The paper will conclude with a few remarks about a suggested technique for ray computation based on a more general type of velocity profile than is currently being used.