Pipe Post-Script

The end of the big engineering project came and went fairly swiftly, but not without a few fairly long experiment/analysis/writing sessions to finish it off. (It wouldn't be a proper project without them ... riiight??)

The result was that my visions of a brilliant new way of detecting pipes was only partly correct. The final experiments involved sweeping the antenna in front of a pipe, which had been hidden behind a very large wooden board. The pipe could be clearly seen in the reflection data and with a bit of processing the peak in reflected power could be made rather significant.

The pipe is causing that ripple!

And with a bit of manipulation of the underlying phasors we can make the peak magically appear!

Unfortunately the usefulness in the reflection data for distinguishing pipes and non-pipes was not tested (a year is a remarkably short time in the end). Looking at the initial goals for the project - they were all met, the method was tested in the ways proposed and experience in how the data generally worked allowed me to build a schematic of the pipe detector!

Inevitably the question after every project is what next? - well I think it is time for something completely different...