Fighter Control?
Well Danny I was lucky enough to get a visit to RAF Neatishead many years ago just prior to a refit so I saw the old equipment.
To be honest I was shocked at the state of the kit they had then. Civil radar had been using displays with mode A/C readouts and callsign conversions for some time but Air Defence was still using just primary radar with a tracker ball "click and read out" which at best gave a single readout every 15 secs (ie per radar head rotation).
I was there during a small evening exercise where I sat with one controller who had an attacking pair while my friend sat with the controller with the defending pair. The attackers got through using a small trick. Clearly the defenders were monitoring the attackers TAD. As the attackers lead called a climb to FL210. The defenders also climbed but the attackers in fact stayed at low level. Great visit as we also were allowed into the controllers brief and debrief and learnt a lot from it like what hot and cold meant and the bulleye system.
Glad to see they have much better stuff now having seen a display they had at RAF Waddington's show a couple of years ago.
Not managed a visit to Swanwick but remember one to West Drayton when they still didn't have radar there. Believe that was at Sopley at the time.
What's better is that I can sit and watch a lot of stuff going on, yep I'm a bit of a anorak with a Mode S box connected to my PC which shows a fair bit of the higher civvie stuff around plus a radio to try and figure what's going on locally.