Distant-Early-Warning Line Radars: The Quest for Automatic Signal Detection (Lincoln Laboratory Journal, 2000)

The Lincoln Laboratory Journal’s own history of the DEW Line radars (vol. 12, no. 2, 2000), written by two participants - Naka led the automated signal-processing work. For the Fluttar story it is the lineage document: it records that Lincoln Laboratory knew the Canadian bistatic design for the Mid-Canada Line, judged its head-on forward-scatter geometry too vulnerable to birds, and deliberately offset the antenna beams and added a high-pass filter to reject them - and that the deployed AN/FPS-23 radars were still ‘phased out after a few years’ because of false alarms from ‘birds and bush pilots.’ One caution carried into our footnotes: writing 45 years later, the authors credit the Canadian work to ‘the National Research Council in Ottawa’; Canadian records say the Defence Research Board and McGill University.