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Old 28th Jan 2016, 23:14
  #40 (permalink)  
PrivtPilotRadarTech
 
Join Date: Jul 2014
Location: Santa Rosa, CA, USA
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Funny story about what it would have been like on the receiving end. During the early 70's I was a radar tech stationed on a mountain top just NW of the Golden Gate Bridge. We had a exercise. I was given a stopwatch, a compass, a telephone, and a dosimeter, and told to sit in a foxhole on the edge of the peak with a gorgeous view of the San Francisco Bay Area. There was a phone jack for the phone. I was to scan the scene, and when I saw the flash of a nuke going off, start my stopwatch and use my compass to take a bearing to the mushroom cloud. When I heard the bang I was to note the time interval, and phone in the bearing and time. In the operations building they had a large map of the bay area, with a measuring stick marked in seconds at the speed of sound. They would swing that to the bearing and mark the distance given by the flash/bang interval. The dosimeter was a yellow pen-like thing. You looked thru it like a telescope and you'd see a scale and some indicator of how much radiation you'd been exposed to. I put it in the pocket of my field jacket and forgot to return it, still have it. I laugh to think what it would have been like, an earnest 21 yr old trying to keep track of flash/bang intervals as nukes went off like popcorn popping.
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