Spartan-3 Goes Golfing
Axcon Drives TrackMan Radar

His son graduates from Junior High next week – blank it out… His wife's car needs the oil changed – blank it out… His mother sounded tired when she called last week – blank it out… He tries to empty his conscious of all the noise, the clutter, and the dreary detail of his daily life. He blanks his mind and visualizes himself as if he were watching his own actions from a short distance away. He fast forwards several seconds into the future. He sees himself address the ball and begin the back swing. He feels the pendulum action of the graphite-and-titanium club just as it reaches the perfect azimuth and then starts its arc downward, striking the sphere at the sweet spot from precisely the right angle. His mind's eye watches the track of the ball as it sails perfectly toward his target.

A second later, his conscious goes completely empty as his body starts through the carefully choreographed motions his mind has just visualized. Years of practice and tens of thousands of strokes have trained his muscles to execute the maneuver perfectly – as long as his thoughts don't get in the way. The sound of the club face striking the ball finds his ears, and immediately his finely-tuned intuition knows he has succeeded.

This time, another eye watches his every move. Instead of the golfer's mental visualization, a briefcase-sized unit mounted near the tee takes over the observation task. At 10GHz, electromagnetic waves strike the ball and echo back at slightly different frequencies to a phased array of sensitive antennae. The tiny Doppler shift is almost imperceptible in a sea of seemingly random noise, but when the resulting audio-frequency-difference signal is gathered, queued, and synchronized by a high-performance FPGA and then sent on its way through a USB connection to a waiting signal-processing algorithm running on a PC, the picture becomes clear. Every aspect of the club's movement and the ball's flight is accurately recorded. Even the spin of the ball creates differential signals that tip the tool as to the reason behind the slightly curved flight path. Before the ball hits the ground, its precise trajectory is being plotted on a nearby monitor. [more]