Guru
Joined: 03/03/2016
Location: United StatesPosts: 769
| Posted: 04:41pm 25 May 2020 |
I'm fine Andrew. My wife is in the hospital with an infection which has nothing to do with COVID-19 which is well south of us. We live well out in the country 75 miles north of NYC. A half mile east there is a modern dairy farm with 250 Holsteins.
Radar equipment generally lasts a long time and there isn't much you can do to improve a magnetron. At Pan Am engineering we had a guy, Bob Ackerly, who was involved in assembling the target radar with linear display which spotted the fleet of aircraft coming to bomb Pearl Harbor but were ignored. Those transceivers on Kauai were still functioning the last time I saw them in 1989! All the improvements come in the signal processing and display areas which was where you were working. I only knew about weather radar through the interfaces we had around the world with local systems.
My specialty was the test equipment code for the airborne autopilot and inertial navigation computers. In the 60s we used a punched tape reader to control a Hawker Siddeley Trace ATE which used a PDP11 to test the Bendix PB20B B707 two axis autopilot. The B747 Bendix autopilot test equipment which showed up in 1968 finally got rid of the punched tape reader. The B747 Delco Carousel INS test equipment was controlled by a program read from an IBM 2314 disk about the size of a washing machine which used the 2316 removable disk pack and stored a little less than 30 MB. These gadgets did not use mainstream computer languages. They used hardware dedicated op codes that controlled the airborne computers directly. It was interesting stuff in its day.
Paul in NY