Originally Posted by
Mooncrest
Is a fluoride radar a green monochrome display, as opposed to an orange one ? They once had those at Blackpool, Stansted and Birmingham (Ferranti ?), as I recall, probably fed by any number of primary radar heads.
When Farnborough re-equipped with Cossor Compass 9000 displays in about 1981 they were delivered with green phosphor tubes. On trialling one we quickly found it was totally unsuitable for our purposes as there was no 'afterglow' ie the blips didn't leave a 'tail' on the radar. They would have been ideal for processed radar but we only had the real thing.
The Farnborough head Techie (who of course knew nothing about how ATC was actually done) had apparently ordered these because their projected life was longer than orange phosphor tubes.
We managed to get Cossor to swap them but they weren't too happy about doing it and I'm sure we had one or two tubes which were second hand because thay already had 'burn' marks on them from a video map which definitely wasn't ours.