Hi Mike,
I understand that you want to find a method to test all waypoints that do have line-of-sight visibility to see whether there is terrain in the background in an optimal way.
To do so, you can refer the “viewshed” function. You can use the viewshed function to model radio wave propagation in the atmosphere as straight lines on a sphere. This will provide visible area from point on or above terrain. The syntax can be followed as:
[vis,visR]=viewshed(Z,R,latObs,lonObs,hObs,hTarget,hObsRef,hTargetRef)
This way you can reference the height of the target points to either the terrain (ground level) or the sphere (mean sea level). Here “vis” will be the visibility indicator and “visR” will be the spatial reference for “vis”. While "Z" is the elevation data grid and "R" is the spatial reference for "Z".
With this you can find the area that is visible by radar for an aircraft flying above the terrain. First specify the location of the aircraft, then specify visible areas for the aircraft, for example say at 3000 meters above mean sea level of the surface. Then model radio propagation in the atmosphere by specifying an effective radius for the reference sphere. Refer the code snippet below for better understanding:
latObs = 35;
lonObs = 120;
hObs = 3000;
hTarget = 0;
rad = earthRadius;
[vis1,vis1R] = viewshed(Z,R,latObs,lonObs,hObs,hTarget,"MSL","AGL",rad,4/3*rad);
For more information on the “viewshed” function you can refer the below link:
I hope this helps!
Regards,
Ayush
