It’s been said that “a picture is worth a thousand words”, but certainly that depends on how complete, accurate, and relevant to current problems the picture is.
Few things are more useful than the right picture at the right time. And this applies especially to the situational awareness pictures delivered by CUAS radars.
The Picture Delivered by Scanning Radars
In a word—fragmented. If you swept a flashlight in broad sweeps over a dark landscape, you'd only get a little information at a time.
Scanning radars work like a flashlight, gathering lots of little pictures, one-hundred and eight of them every 1.8 seconds to be exact. The radar software compiles all of those 108 pictures to create one large, hopefully-complete picture. Every 1.8 seconds. That's much too long to wait during a live drone swarm attack.
The Picture Delivered by Volumetric Persistent Radars
A floodlight approach, used by volumentric persistent radars, allows the full picture to be gathered and consumed all at once.
The radar signal sent out from the radar unit travels through the entire coverage area and, bouncing off of anything of significant mass in its path, including large drones, small drones, fiber optic drones, etc, bounces back to the radar at the speed of light.
The entire signal-out and signal-in process takes 56 milliseconds and then repeats. This means that the operator gets a refreshed, accurate view of the entire airspace eighteen times per second (18 Hz), making for smooth, unbroken real-time data on the 500m-minimum stretch of airspace covered by the radar.
See the difference: