Radar out !

By the way, I do like the loudspeakers in the bottom right corner of your picture. They look the same as those in the Leeds Bradford tower between 1967 and 1986. Love the old kit, e.g. Pye Tulip microphones, Astrolite headsets and so on.

Yeah, the Pye Tulip got very floppy, especially by the time we got to 2 miles...quite theatrical really...not enough hands...

Eight point three has meant that the chunky old speakers and solid SPST switches have had to go. Now everything is 'touch display' with all channels piped through one speaker. All very pretty, but all the tactility has gone.

The price of progress I suppose, although I hadn't expected 8.3khz to find its way to airport and airfield RT just yet.

I'm afraid it has; Farnborough tower was 122.5 and is now 122.780.
Big thread on www.forums.flyer.co.uk

Mooncrest, I think you're correct about the displays being green monochrome, but having orange filters over them. Even the processed Plessey 22" 'flat-tops' we had at 'CC were like that too, they even had cursor lines and a rotating bearing-ring. Vectoring was a bit like driving a bus!

[QUOTE=ZOOKER;10030121]Mooncrest, I think you're correct about the displays being green monochrome, but having orange filters over them. Even the processed Plessey 22" 'flat-tops' we had at 'CC were like that too, they even had cursor lines and a rotating bearing-ring. Vectoring was a bit like driving a bus![/QUOT

Sounds like fun. The monochrome displays initially used at LBA with the Watchman also had the rotating ring thing. They were upright...sitting on borrowed canteen tables!

The new 'all processed' radar systems all seem to be giving problems at airfields providing services outside CAS. In the Isle of Man (Ronaldsway) a Selex ATCR-33S PSR was installed in 2011 together with a Wide Area Multilateration Mode-S SSR. It only became operational towards the end of 2017, with several limitations imposed on services outside CAS, compared with the Watchman which remains on standby.

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.

Mooncrest,
I remember doing a liaison visit to LBA.....We came via Pole Hill, by road, and took pictures of the DVOR on the way. The VCR was functioning normally, but Approach was being 're-furbished'.....Everything was balanced on card-tables, with lots of exposed wires hanging out of things.......Early 1980s.

That might have been a bit later than you think ZOOKER. When I first visited LBA tower in the summer of 1988 the radar room had only recently been commissioned and much of the equipment was sitting on tables. Two years later a proper job was done and the tables were gone. Since then radar has undergone another refurb with new processing systems and large flat Dell PC monitors for the radar displays. It's very swish. I think there is a time-lapse video of the installation on YouTube.

You may be correct Mooncrest.

I took a couple of Kodachrome slides which will have the processing date on them, (granted, not the month of the visit)....If I can find them, I'll report back.

Jolly good.

Warton radar
 

Can any of you tell me what the Primary and Secondary Surveillance Radars are at Warton? I believe the PSR is a Marconi S511 but no idea on the SSR.

If it's still in use, I believe they had the SSR fed in from the NATS radar at Lytham St Annes. They didn't have their own interrogator because there is a policy in the UK not to over-interrogate because it causes too much fruiting and garbling, although the St Annes radar had its own little 'quirk' connected with garbling caused by the radar reflecting from a gasometer; gasometer empty - no problems; gasometer full and the reflection would give you a primary blip at about 90 deg on the display from where it should have been.

When the St.Annes was changed to a Watchman, if the sea was rough off Starr Gate, we could sit at EGCC and see the waves.

Thank you Chevvron and Zooker. From other sources I understand the current fit is a Selex (now Leonardo) ATCR 44S co mount.

I'm unsure if there are any civil S511 installations left in the UK. I know that Bristol, Cardiff, East Midlands, Newcastle and Southend once had them but I believe those have all gone. As for its Plessey contemporary, the Watchman, it lives on at Leeds Bradford and perhaps still at Humberside, Teesside and Southampton. Maybe the MOD airfields still have the Watchman too.

By the way, did the S511 use magnetron technology rather than travelling wave tube ?

There are still quite a few Watchmen kicking around MoD sites, although they are due to be replaced by STAR2000s.

Didn't Blackpool have an S511 which went to Cambridge fairly recently?