Originally Posted by
eglnyt
Northolt is a slightly special case. Northolt Approach is at Swanwick and the workstation they use has no provision for either a DF display or integration of DF equipment with the radar display because it's a standard NATS Workstation and NATS sees no need for it at approach positions in the London TMA. It remains part of the D&D network though.
The Little Rissington installation and the one at Manston are also 'stand alone' in that they don't feed to the airfields where they are located but are part of the the Swanwick Mil system.
At Farnborough we got rid of the old green 'CADF' CRTs and had Furneaux DRDFs installed way back in about '76; the RAF looked at these and eventually installed DRDF too but as usual it took them quite a while as we were funded by MOD(PE) rather than MOD(Air) and we got 16 inch Cossor displays along with SSR prior to the AR15 MOD (Air) system.
We kept the Furneaux displays through Watchman until they were replaced by TAG in 2002 under a NATS contract after much discussion with TAG who didn't want to fund DRDF. I think they supplied Frequentis DFs. A few years after I retired I heard they had withdrawn the DF displays completely; pity because by then I had become a FISO and a single channel DF would have been useful to assist in detecting infringers of the Heathrow CTR from where I was based at Fairoaks.