rae2xyz

Transform radar coordinates (Range, Azimuth, Elevation) to Cartesian coordinates (East, North, Up)

Description

A variation of Matlab's sph2cart, that transforms a vector of radar coordinates (Range, Azimuth, Elevation) to Cartesian coordinates (East, North, Up). Note the different definition of radar coords vs. spherical coords, which require this different function (see exact definitions within the help comment).

input format #1: [...] = rae2xyz(range, azimuth, elevation)
input format #2: [...] = rae2xyz(rae)
output format #1: [east, north, up] = rae2xyz(...)
output format #2: xyz = rae2xyz(...)

The input coordinates may be either singular values or a vector of coordinate points.

Use the corresponding xyz2rae function for the reverse transformation.

Note: rae2xyz does NOT take into account earth curvature, Ionosphere beam curving etc. - this simple function uses a simple flat-earth free-space model.

• MATLAB release: MATLAB 6.0 (R12)

[John D'Errico]

This is not a code that huge numbers of people will find extremely useful, plus the actual computational kernel is relatively small. (Sorry Yair, but I'm not insulting your code, instead take this review as a sincere compliment.) Even so, the author has written it carefully and documented it well. He has taken pains to allow you to provide your input in several forms, checking for errors along the way. I'd suggest that many Matlab programmers who aspire to improve the quality of their code might learn from what they find here. High quality code does not stop at just a few lines of dense code. It should include well written documentation as well as careful error checking on the parameters. Well written code should worry about the interface with you, the user.

One minor point - Input format #2 allows you to provide the inputs bundled into one single array. Must this array be an nx3 array? (Yes.) Or could it be 3xn? While I like to build these things as nx3 arrays, others seem to use 3xn arrays here. (If so, then what would happen if there were exactly 3 points, so it is 3x3?) There is no indication in the help of the expected shape of the array.

[bigoh Oh]