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Click here to go to our radome material page (new for July 2026, it doesn't suck like this page)
New for July 2026. Yes, boys and girls, we are finally adding some content on radomes. A radome is something that protects your expensive microwave gear from the elements, yet has transmission properties that allow it to be nearly transparent to microwave signals within your frequency band.
The word "radome" is a portmanteau of "radar" and "dome.
Because we don't have much radome material, here is a useful link to a web site that offers more info on the subject: radomes.net
A radome story (new for July 2026)
Back a few recessions and Bush presidencies ago, a defense company was looking to keep engineers busy with a commercial project. That company's name stared with "R" and ended with "theon". One of their competitors, Hughes Aircraft, had made a big splash by deploying direct broadcast satellite TV in the United States in 1994, which they called DirecTV.
The R company had relationships with governments all over the world, from selling defense products. iIn the 1990s, South Korea had placed a spy plane contract worth 100s of millions of dollars with them. South Korea had interest in direct broadcast television, launching two satellites in 1995 that had that capability. The R company asked itself, why not try to market dish antennas to Korean households?
Development began with a focus group trying to some up with features that would set Company R apart from competitors... parabolic dishes are ugly, why not add a hemispherical radome to hide them? And while we are at it, let's make the dish smaller and less obtrusive. Say, we make MMICs, maybe we could build a Ku-band LNA for this effort and fill the foundry? That last idea fell out quickly due to the high cost of MMICs and their higher noise figure compared to discrete FETs.
Work proceeded with a link budget, then creating a cheap low noise block that resembled everyone else's... two stages of super-low-noise FETs from Japan followed by a mixer fed by a cheap dielectric resonator oscillator (DRO), all soldered to a circuit board.
Two issues killed the program. First, the smaller dish did not have the directivity to pull in geostationary signals (someone messed up the math). Adding a radome to the system degraded the signal-to-noise ratio even more. And second, a marketing study in Korea revealed that people thought that it looked like a giant boob and did not want it on their homes. Thus the program was killed off before it made it to the Wasted Money Hall of Fame, which includes efforts such as the JLENS blimps system and the Beechcraft Starship from the very same R company.