Was talking with a friend earlier and we got on to local island archaeology and Ground Penetrating Radar. These radar sets that operate at lower than usual frequencies as moisture and minerals in the soil will greatly attenuate radio waves - the higher the frequency, the greater the attenuation. They are used to determine sub-surface structure of the soil as well as to locate utility lines and buried items.
Commercial units sell in the ten+ thousand dollar range. I was wondering if anyone had built their own. Quite a few have.
Here is an excellent presentation from a 2017 conference in Poland. They were using COTS parts and an embedded microprocessor and it cost about $600. There has been a renaissance in Software Defined Radios in the last five years so I am betting that the sensitivity could be brought up quite a lot and the cost brought down even more. This would be a perfect application for a Raspberry Pi.
For visualization, this software:
PFMABE SOFTWARE
Welcome to the Pure File Magic Area Based Editor (PFMABE). Now view and edit your hydro, bathy and topo data in 3D. Under development by the Naval Oceanographic Office since 1998, this powerful data editing suite ingests most major sonar and lidar data types and allows for quick and easy analysis, cleaning and quality control.
That presentation looks to be the best place to start - might be a fun project for this coming winter...
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