The best things I can recommend is to play with GnuRadio, IQ data, false color representation of a freq or set of frequencies bound to color/decibel strength, and ParaView and importing said IQ data for graphing.
Think of the frequency of light as its color, and dB strength of how bright it is. However at cm and m wavelengths, voids happen much more regularly. That light can 'bend' around, and go through objects.
> There aren’t any good videos out there of just a straight forward visualization of RF light.
There's quite a few false color images. If you look at hydrogen line radioastrometry, there's a ton of false color images. There's also this HackADay that mapped wifi for a wide area covered by their CNC gantry https://hackaday.com/2015/02/17/mapping-wifi-signals-in-3-di...
> And also, why can visible light pass through other visible light without causing interference?
EM primarily only directly affect things with an electric charge. EM radiation itself doesn't have an electric charge, therefore EM usually doesn't affect other EM. However, if we include gamma (+10^19 Hz), then if those collide, they can create an electron and a positron. But that's only theorized with energy vector diagrams and not actually seen.
> Why can’t they make visible light with an antenna?
You can... You just have to pump enough energy in it to make it glow! /hahaha
> Why are large arrays of RF receivers not more widely used for small-scale RF imaging?
That's primarily a cost issue. Go look how much a single RF frontend chip and an a/d chip costs. (Price gets to stupid levels at, say 24 bit A/D).
Now instead, lets look at human vision. Humans can see (eyes are receptors of radio from 380nM to 720nM). When converted to Hz, we're talking 372.55 THz wide spectrum vision.
My SDR on the table can see 112 MHz, or .0000112 THz
Now, in order to replicate what's going on in the eye, you'd need millions of antennas AND data acquisition (of some sort). And then, even with current SDRs, these generate 60GB/min - you need the disk, memory, and CPU to do stuff with that. It's NOT a trivial problem.
Now there are some RF arrays out there. KerberosSDR is one such array. However, its max bandwidth is 3 MHz @ 8 bit. And it can only do 4 inputs, which is enough to do geographical tracking of radio signals (within 24MHz to 1.7GHz). I know of one person who's trying to do some VR work with a KerberosSDR.
The other problem, once you have the millions of antennas and data acquisition, is a matter of synchronization. Timing is also another stupidly hard area, which increases geometrically with more sensors. And remember that 1nS = 11.8 inches deviation.. So whatever processing you're doing had better be time consistent and local to the device.
Eventually, we'll get to what you're proposing. A lot of us are wanting that. But we're decades away.
The best things I can recommend is to play with GnuRadio, IQ data, false color representation of a freq or set of frequencies bound to color/decibel strength, and ParaView and importing said IQ data for graphing.
Think of the frequency of light as its color, and dB strength of how bright it is. However at cm and m wavelengths, voids happen much more regularly. That light can 'bend' around, and go through objects.
> There aren’t any good videos out there of just a straight forward visualization of RF light.
There's quite a few false color images. If you look at hydrogen line radioastrometry, there's a ton of false color images. There's also this HackADay that mapped wifi for a wide area covered by their CNC gantry https://hackaday.com/2015/02/17/mapping-wifi-signals-in-3-di...
> And also, why can visible light pass through other visible light without causing interference?
EM primarily only directly affect things with an electric charge. EM radiation itself doesn't have an electric charge, therefore EM usually doesn't affect other EM. However, if we include gamma (+10^19 Hz), then if those collide, they can create an electron and a positron. But that's only theorized with energy vector diagrams and not actually seen.
> Why can’t they make visible light with an antenna?
You can... You just have to pump enough energy in it to make it glow! /hahaha
> Why are large arrays of RF receivers not more widely used for small-scale RF imaging?
That's primarily a cost issue. Go look how much a single RF frontend chip and an a/d chip costs. (Price gets to stupid levels at, say 24 bit A/D).
Now instead, lets look at human vision. Humans can see (eyes are receptors of radio from 380nM to 720nM). When converted to Hz, we're talking 372.55 THz wide spectrum vision.
My SDR on the table can see 112 MHz, or .0000112 THz
Now, in order to replicate what's going on in the eye, you'd need millions of antennas AND data acquisition (of some sort). And then, even with current SDRs, these generate 60GB/min - you need the disk, memory, and CPU to do stuff with that. It's NOT a trivial problem.
Now there are some RF arrays out there. KerberosSDR is one such array. However, its max bandwidth is 3 MHz @ 8 bit. And it can only do 4 inputs, which is enough to do geographical tracking of radio signals (within 24MHz to 1.7GHz). I know of one person who's trying to do some VR work with a KerberosSDR.
The other problem, once you have the millions of antennas and data acquisition, is a matter of synchronization. Timing is also another stupidly hard area, which increases geometrically with more sensors. And remember that 1nS = 11.8 inches deviation.. So whatever processing you're doing had better be time consistent and local to the device.
Eventually, we'll get to what you're proposing. A lot of us are wanting that. But we're decades away.